A streaming algorithm for computing an approximate minimum spanning ellipse

We propose a streaming algorithm to compute an approximate ellipse of a set of points. This extends the work of Zarrabi-Zadeh and Chan who proposed a very simple algorithm to compute a 3/2-approximate (in terms of radius) d-dimensional ball in the same model. We have been able to obtain only a very crude approximation ratio of 9k 4 √ 1−e2 (in terms of area), where e is the eccentricity of the minimum spanning ellipse of the point set, and k is a constant defined in the text. The algorithm uses O(1) space, and O(1) time for each point.