Existing methods for retrieving k-nearest neighbours suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We argue this is caused in part by inherent deficiencies of space partitioning, which is the underlying strategy used by most existing methods. We devise a new strategy that avoids partitioning the vector space and present a novel randomized algorithm that runs in time linear in dimensionality of the space and sub-linear in the intrinsic dimensionality and the size of the dataset and takes space constant in dimensionality of the space and linear in the size of the dataset. The proposed algorithm allows fine-grained control over accuracy and speed on a per-query basis, automatically adapts to variations in data density, supports dynamic updates to the dataset and is easy-to-implement. We show appealing theoretical properties and demonstrate empirically that the proposed algorithm outperforms locality-sensitivity hashing (LSH) in terms of approximation quality, speed and space efficiency.
One class of methods @cite_2 @cite_23 @cite_19 @cite_4 that does not rely on space partitioning uses a local search strategy. Starting from a random data point, these methods iteratively find a new data point that is closer to the query than the previous data point. Unfortunately, the performance of these methods deteriorates in the presence of significant variations in data density, since it may take very long to navigate a dense region of the space, even if it is very far from the query. Other methods like navigating nets @cite_13 , cover trees @cite_17 and rank cover trees @cite_16 adopt a coarse-to-fine strategy. These methods work by maintaining coarse subsets of points at varying scales and progressively searching the neighbourhood of the query with decreasing radii at increasingly finer scales. Sadly, the running times of these methods again exhibit exponential dependence on the intrinsic dimensionality.
@cite_4 @cite_19 @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_16 @cite_13 @cite_17
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Existing methods for retrieving k-nearest neighbours suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We argue this is caused in part by inherent deficiencies of space partitioning, which is the underlying strategy used by most existing methods. We devise a new strategy that avoids partitioning the vector space and present a novel randomized algorithm that runs in time linear in dimensionality of the space and sub-linear in the intrinsic dimensionality and the size of the dataset and takes space constant in dimensionality of the space and linear in the size of the dataset. The proposed algorithm allows fine-grained control over accuracy and speed on a per-query basis, automatically adapts to variations in data density, supports dynamic updates to the dataset and is easy-to-implement. We show appealing theoretical properties and demonstrate empirically that the proposed algorithm outperforms locality-sensitivity hashing (LSH) in terms of approximation quality, speed and space efficiency. For similarity search in high-dimensional vector spaces (or ‘HDVSs’), researchers have proposed a number of new methods (or adaptations of existing methods) based, in the main, on data-space partitioning. However, the performance of these methods generally degrades as dimensionality increases. Although this phenomenon-known as the ‘dimensional curse’-is well known, little or no quantitative a.nalysis of the phenomenon is available. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of partitioning and clustering techniques for similarity search in HDVSs. We show formally that these methods exhibit linear complexity at high dimensionality, and that existing methods are outperformed on average by a simple sequential scan if the number of dimensions exceeds around 10. Consequently, we come up with an alternative organization based on approximations to make the unavoidable sequential scan as fast as possible. We describe a simple vector approximation scheme, called VA-file, and report on an experimental evaluation of this and of two tree-based index methods (an R*-tree and an X-tree). Given a set S of n sites (points), and a distance measure d , the nearestneighborsearching problem is to build a data structure so that given a query point q , the site nearest to q can be found quickly. This paper gives data structures for this problem when the sites and queries are in a metric space. One data structure, D(S) , uses a divide-and-conquer recursion. The other data structure, M(S,Q) , is somewhat like a skiplist. Both are simple and implementable. The data structures are analyzed when the metric space obeys a certain sphere-packing bound, and when the sites and query points are random and have distributions with an exchangeability property. This property implies, for example, that query point q is a random element of ( S q ) . Under these conditions, the preprocessing and space bounds for the algorithms are close to linear in n . They depend also on the sphere-packing bound, and on the logarithm of the distanceratio ( (S) ) of S , the ratio of the distance between the farthest pair of points in S to the distance between the closest pair. The data structure M(S,Q) requires as input data an additional set Q , taken to be representative of the query points. The resource bounds of M(S,Q) have a dependence on the distance ratio of S ( )Q . While M(S,Q) can return wrong answers, its failure probability can be bounded, and is decreasing in a parameter K . Here K≤ |Q| n is chosen when building M(S,Q) . The expected query time for M(S,Q) is O(Klog n)log ( (S Q) ) , and the resource bounds increase linearly in K . The data structure D(S) has expected O( log n) O(1) query time, for fixed distance ratio. The preprocessing algorithm for M(S,Q) can be used to solve the all nearest neighbor problem for S in O(n(log n) 2 (log ϒ(S)) 2 ) expected time. The quest for processing data in high-dimensional space has resulted in a number of innovative indexing mechanisms. Choosing an appropriate indexing method for a given set of data requires careful consideration of data properties, data construction methods, and query types. We present a new indexing method to support efficient point queries, range queries, and k-nearest neighbor queries. Our method indexes objects dynamically using algebraic techniques, and it can substantially reduce the negative impacts of the "curse of dimensionality". In particular, our method partitions the data space recursively into hypercubes of certain capacity and labels each hypercube using the Cantor pairing function, so that all objects in the same hypercube have the same label. The bijective property and the computational efficiency of the Cantor pairing function make it possible to efficiently map between high-dimensional vectors and scalar labels. The partitioning and labeling process splits a subspace if the data items contained in it exceed its capacity. From the data structure point of view, our method constructs a tree where each parent node contains a number of labels and child pointers, and we call it a PL-tree . We compare our method with popular indexing algorithms including R*-tree, X-tree, quad-tree, and iDistance. Our numerical results show that the dynamic PL-tree indexing significantly outperforms the existing indexing mechanisms. The nearestor near-neighbor query problems arise in a large variety of database applications, usually in the context of similarity searching. Of late, there has been increasing interest in building search index structures for performing similarity search over high-dimensional data, e.g., image databases, document collections, time-series databases, and genome databases. Unfortunately, all known techniques for solving this problem fall prey to the of dimensionality." That is, the data structures scale poorly with data dimensionality; in fact, if the number of dimensions exceeds 10 to 20, searching in k-d trees and related structures involves the inspection of a large fraction of the database, thereby doing no better than brute-force linear search. It has been suggested that since the selection of features and the choice of a distance metric in typical applications is rather heuristic, determining an approximate nearest neighbor should su ce for most practical purposes. In this paper, we examine a novel scheme for approximate similarity search based on hashing. The basic idea is to hash the points Supported by NAVY N00014-96-1-1221 grant and NSF Grant IIS-9811904. Supported by Stanford Graduate Fellowship and NSF NYI Award CCR-9357849. Supported by ARO MURI Grant DAAH04-96-1-0007, NSF Grant IIS-9811904, and NSF Young Investigator Award CCR9357849, with matching funds from IBM, Mitsubishi, Schlumberger Foundation, Shell Foundation, and Xerox Corporation. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and or special permission from the Endowment. Proceedings of the 25th VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1999. from the database so as to ensure that the probability of collision is much higher for objects that are close to each other than for those that are far apart. We provide experimental evidence that our method gives signi cant improvement in running time over other methods for searching in highdimensional spaces based on hierarchical tree decomposition. Experimental results also indicate that our scheme scales well even for a relatively large number of dimensions (more than 50). Conventional spatial queries, such as range search and nearest neighbor retrieval, involve only conditions on objects' geometric properties. Today, many modern applications call for novel forms of queries that aim to find objects satisfying both a spatial predicate, and a predicate on their associated texts. For example, instead of considering all the restaurants, a nearest neighbor query would instead ask for the restaurant that is the closest among those whose menus contain “steak, spaghetti, brandy” all at the same time. Currently, the best solution to such queries is based on the IR 2-tree, which, as shown in this paper, has a few deficiencies that seriously impact its efficiency. Motivated by this, we develop a new access method called the spatial inverted index that extends the conventional inverted index to cope with multidimensional data, and comes with algorithms that can answer nearest neighbor queries with keywords in real time. As verified by experiments, the proposed techniques outperform the IR 2-tree in query response time significantly, often by a factor of orders of magnitude. For some multimedia applications, it has been found that domain objects cannot be represented as feature vectors in a multidimensional space. Instead, pair-wise distances between data objects are the only input. To support content-based retrieval, one approach maps each object to a k-dimensional (k-d) point and tries to preserve the distances among the points. Then, existing spatial access index methods such as the R-trees and KD-trees can support fast searching on the resulting k-d points. However, information loss is inevitable with such an approach since the distances between data objects can only be preserved to a certain extent. Here we investigate the use of a distance-based indexing method. In particular, we apply the vantage point tree (vp-tree) method. There are two important problems for the vp-tree method that warrant further investigation, the n-nearest neighbors search and the updating mechanisms. We study an n-nearest neighbors search algorithm for the vp-tree, which is shown by experiments to scale up well with the size of the dataset and the desired number of nearest neighbors, n. Experiments also show that the searching in the vp-tree is more efficient than that for the @math -tree and the M-tree. Next, we propose solutions for the update problem for the vp-tree, and show by experiments that the algorithms are efficient and effective. Finally, we investigate the problem of selecting vantage-point, propose a few alternative methods, and study their impact on the number of distance computation. [See the paper for the full abstract.] We show tight upper and lower bounds for time-space trade-offs for the @math -Approximate Near Neighbor Search problem. For the @math -dimensional Euclidean space and @math -point datasets, we develop a data structure with space @math and query time @math for every @math such that: This is the first data structure that achieves sublinear query time and near-linear space for every approximation factor @math , improving upon [Kapralov, PODS 2015]. The data structure is a culmination of a long line of work on the problem for all space regimes; it builds on Spherical Locality-Sensitive Filtering [Becker, Ducas, Gama, Laarhoven, SODA 2016] and data-dependent hashing [Andoni, Indyk, Nguyen, Razenshteyn, SODA 2014] [Andoni, Razenshteyn, STOC 2015]. Our matching lower bounds are of two types: conditional and unconditional. First, we prove tightness of the whole above trade-off in a restricted model of computation, which captures all known hashing-based approaches. We then show unconditional cell-probe lower bounds for one and two probes that match the above trade-off for @math , improving upon the best known lower bounds from [Panigrahy, Talwar, Wieder, FOCS 2010]. In particular, this is the first space lower bound (for any static data structure) for two probes which is not polynomially smaller than the one-probe bound. To show the result for two probes, we establish and exploit a connection to locally-decodable codes. In this paper, we tackle the problem of constructing a differentially private synopsis for two-dimensional datasets such as geospatial datasets. The current state-of-the-art methods work by performing recursive binary partitioning of the data domains, and constructing a hierarchy of partitions. We show that the key challenge in partition-based synopsis methods lies in choosing the right partition granularity to balance the noise error and the non-uniformity error. We study the uniform-grid approach, which applies an equi-width grid of a certain size over the data domain and then issues independent count queries on the grid cells. This method has received no attention in the literature, probably due to the fact that no good method for choosing a grid size was known. Based on an analysis of the two kinds of errors, we propose a method for choosing the grid size. Experimental results validate our method, and show that this approach performs as well as, and often times better than, the state-of-the-art methods. We further introduce a novel adaptive-grid method. The adaptive grid method lays a coarse-grained grid over the dataset, and then further partitions each cell according to its noisy count. Both levels of partitions are then used in answering queries over the dataset. This method exploits the need to have finer granularity partitioning over dense regions and, at the same time, coarse partitioning over sparse regions. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we show that this approach consistently and significantly outperforms the uniform-grid method and other state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we tackle the problem of constructing a differentially private synopsis for two-dimensional datasets such as geospatial datasets. The current state-of-the-art methods work by performing recursive binary partitioning of the data domains, and constructing a hierarchy of partitions. We show that the key challenge in partition-based synopsis methods lies in choosing the right partition granularity to balance the noise error and the non-uniformity error. We study the uniform-grid approach, which applies an equi-width grid of a certain size over the data domain and then issues independent count queries on the grid cells. This method has received no attention in the literature, probably due to the fact that no good method for choosing a grid size was known. Based on an analysis of the two kinds of errors, we propose a method for choosing the grid size. Experimental results validate our method, and show that this approach performs as well as, and often times better than, the state-of-the-art methods. We further introduce a novel adaptive-grid method. The adaptive grid method lays a coarse-grained grid over the dataset, and then further partitions each cell according to its noisy count. Both levels of partitions are then used in answering queries over the dataset. This method exploits the need to have finer granularity partitioning over dense regions and, at the same time, coarse partitioning over sparse regions. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we show that this approach consistently and significantly outperforms the uniform-grid method and other state-of-the-art methods. In this paper, we investigate the selectivity estimation problem for streaming spatio-textual data, which arises in many social network and geo-location applications. Specifically, given a set of continuously and rapidly arriving spatio-textual objects, each of which is described by a geo-location and a short text, we aim to accurately estimate the cardinality of a spatial keyword query on objects seen so far, where a spatial keyword query consists of a search region and a set of query keywords. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address this important problem. We first extend two existing techniques to solve this problem, and show their limitations. Inspired by two key observations on the "locality" of the correlations among query keywords, we propose a local correlation based method by utilizing an augmented adaptive space partition tree (A2SP-tree for short) to approximately learn a local Bayesian network on-the-fly for a given query and estimate its selectivity. A novel local boosting approach is presented to further enhance the learning accuracy of local Bayesian networks. Our comprehensive experiments on real-life datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the local correlation based algorithm in terms of estimation accuracy compared to other competitors. We introduce a new probabilistic proximity search algorithm for range and A"-nearest neighbor (A"-NN) searching in both coordinate and metric spaces. Although there exist solutions for these problems, they boil down to a linear scan when the space is intrinsically high dimensional, as is the case in many pattern recognition tasks. This, for example, renders the A"-NN approach to classification rather slow in large databases. Our novel idea is to predict closeness between elements according to how they order their distances toward a distinguished set of anchor objects. Each element in the space sorts the anchor objects from closest to farthest to it and the similarity between orders turns out to be an excellent predictor of the closeness between the corresponding elements. We present extensive experiments comparing our method against state-of-the-art exact and approximate techniques, both in synthetic and real, metric and nonmetric databases, measuring both CPU time and distance computations. The experiments demonstrate that our technique almost always improves upon the performance of alternative techniques, in some cases by a wide margin. We present a new method for clustering based on compression. The method does not use subject-specific features or background knowledge, and works as follows: First, we determine a parameter-free, universal, similarity distance, the normalized compression distance or NCD, computed from the lengths of compressed data files (singly and in pairwise concatenation). Second, we apply a hierarchical clustering method. The NCD is not restricted to a specific application area, and works across application area boundaries. A theoretical precursor, the normalized information distance, co-developed by one of the authors, is provably optimal. However, the optimality comes at the price of using the noncomputable notion of Kolmogorov complexity. We propose axioms to capture the real-world setting, and show that the NCD approximates optimality. To extract a hierarchy of clusters from the distance matrix, we determine a dendrogram (ternary tree) by a new quartet method and a fast heuristic to implement it. The method is implemented and available as public software, and is robust under choice of different compressors. To substantiate our claims of universality and robustness, we report evidence of successful application in areas as diverse as genomics, virology, languages, literature, music, handwritten digits, astronomy, and combinations of objects from completely different domains, using statistical, dictionary, and block sorting compressors. In genomics, we presented new evidence for major questions in Mammalian evolution, based on whole-mitochondrial genomic analysis: the Eutherian orders and the Marsupionta hypothesis against the Theria hypothesis. Nearest Neighbor (NN) search in high-dimensional space is an important problem in many applications. From the database perspective, a good solution needs to have two properties: (i) it can be easily incorporated in a relational database, and (ii) its query cost should increase sublinearly with the dataset size, regardless of the data and query distributions. Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a well-known methodology fulfilling both requirements, but its current implementations either incur expensive space and query cost, or abandon its theoretical guarantee on the quality of query results. Motivated by this, we improve LSH by proposing an access method called the Locality-Sensitive B-tree (LSB-tree) to enable fast, accurate, high-dimensional NN search in relational databases. The combination of several LSB-trees forms a LSB-forest that has strong quality guarantees, but improves dramatically the efficiency of the previous LSH implementation having the same guarantees. In practice, the LSB-tree itself is also an effective index which consumes linear space, supports efficient updates, and provides accurate query results. In our experiments, the LSB-tree was faster than: (i) iDistance (a famous technique for exact NN search) by two orders of magnitude, and (ii) MedRank (a recent approximate method with nontrivial quality guarantees) by one order of magnitude, and meanwhile returned much better results. As a second step, we extend our LSB technique to solve another classic problem, called Closest Pair (CP) search, in high-dimensional space. The long-term challenge for this problem has been to achieve subquadratic running time at very high dimensionalities, which fails most of the existing solutions. We show that, using a LSB-forest, CP search can be accomplished in (worst-case) time significantly lower than the quadratic complexity, yet still ensuring very good quality. In practice, accurate answers can be found using just two LSB-trees, thus giving a substantial reduction in the space and running time. In our experiments, our technique was faster: (i) than distance browsing (a well-known method for solving the problem exactly) by several orders of magnitude, and (ii) than D-shift (an approximate approach with theoretical guarantees in low-dimensional space) by one order of magnitude, and at the same time, outputs better results. We present an efficient indexing method to locate 1-dimensional subsequences within a collection of sequences, such that the subsequences match a given (query) pattern within a specified tolerance. The idea is to map each data sequences into a small set of multidimensional rectangles in feature space. Then, these rectangles can be readily indexed using traditional spatial access methods, like the R*-tree [9]. In more detail, we use a sliding window over the data sequence and extract its features; the result is a trail in feature space. We propose an efficient and effective algorithm to divide such trails into sub-trails, which are subsequently represented by their Minimum Bounding Rectangles (MBRs). We also examine queries of varying lengths, and we show how to handle each case efficiently. We implemented our method and carried out experiments on synthetic and real data (stock price movements). We compared the method to sequential scanning, which is the only obvious competitor. The results were excellent: our method accelerated the search time from 3 times up to 100 times. Nearest neighbor (NN) search in high dimensional space is an important problem in many applications. Ideally, a practical solution (i) should be implementable in a relational database, and (ii) its query cost should grow sub-linearly with the dataset size, regardless of the data and query distributions. Despite the bulk of NN literature, no solution fulfills both requirements, except locality sensitive hashing (LSH). The existing LSH implementations are either rigorous or adhoc. Rigorous-LSH ensures good quality of query results, but requires expensive space and query cost. Although adhoc-LSH is more efficient, it abandons quality control, i.e., the neighbor it outputs can be arbitrarily bad. As a result, currently no method is able to ensure both quality and efficiency simultaneously in practice. Motivated by this, we propose a new access method called the locality sensitive B-tree (LSB-tree) that enables fast high-dimensional NN search with excellent quality. The combination of several LSB-trees leads to a structure called the LSB-forest that ensures the same result quality as rigorous-LSH, but reduces its space and query cost dramatically. The LSB-forest also outperforms adhoc-LSH, even though the latter has no quality guarantee. Besides its appealing theoretical properties, the LSB-tree itself also serves as an effective index that consumes linear space, and supports efficient updates. Our extensive experiments confirm that the LSB-tree is faster than (i) the state of the art of exact NN search by two orders of magnitude, and (ii) the best (linear-space) method of approximate retrieval by an order of magnitude, and at the same time, returns neighbors with much better quality. We tackle the problem of extracting stay regions from a geospatial trajectory where a user has stayed longer than a certain time threshold. There are four major difficulties with this problem: (1) stay regions are not only point-type ones such as at a bus-stop but large and arbitrary-shaped ones such as at a shopping mall; (2) trajectories contain spatial outliers; (3) there are missing points in trajectories; and (4) trajectories should be analyzed in an online mode. Previous algorithms cannot overcome these difficulties simultaneously. Density-based batch algorithms have advantages over the previous algorithms in discovering of arbitrary-shaped clusters from spatial data containing outliers; however, they do not consider temporal durations and thus have not been used for extracting stay regions. We extended a density-based algorithm so that it would work in a duration-based manner online and have robustness to missing points in stay regions while keeping its advantages. Experiments on real trajectories of 13 users conducting their daily activities for three weeks demonstrated that our algorithm statistically significantly outperformed five state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of F1 score and works well without trajectory preprocessing consisting of filtering, interpolating, and smoothing. This paper deals with two related problems, namely distance-preserving binary embeddings and quantization for compressed sensing . First, we propose fast methods to replace points from a subset @math , associated with the Euclidean metric, with points in the cube @math and we associate the cube with a pseudo-metric that approximates Euclidean distance among points in @math . Our methods rely on quantizing fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss embeddings based on bounded orthonormal systems and partial circulant ensembles, both of which admit fast transforms. Our quantization methods utilize noise-shaping, and include Sigma-Delta schemes and distributed noise-shaping schemes. The resulting approximation errors decay polynomially and exponentially fast in @math , depending on the embedding method. This dramatically outperforms the current decay rates associated with binary embeddings and Hamming distances. Additionally, it is the first such binary embedding result that applies to fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss maps while preserving @math norms. Second, we again consider noise-shaping schemes, albeit this time to quantize compressed sensing measurements arising from bounded orthonormal ensembles and partial circulant matrices. We show that these methods yield a reconstruction error that again decays with the number of measurements (and bits), when using convex optimization for reconstruction. Specifically, for Sigma-Delta schemes, the error decays polynomially in the number of measurements, and it decays exponentially for distributed noise-shaping schemes based on beta encoding. These results are near optimal and the first of their kind dealing with bounded orthonormal systems. We propose a novel approach to performing efficient similarity search and classification in high dimensional data. In this framework, the database elements are vectors in a Euclidean space. Given a query vector in the same space, the goal is to find elements of the database that are similar to the query. In our approach, a small number of independent "voters" rank the database elements based on similarity to the query. These rankings are then combined by a highly efficient aggregation algorithm. Our methodology leads both to techniques for computing approximate nearest neighbors and to a conceptually rich alternative to nearest neighbors.One instantiation of our methodology is as follows. Each voter projects all the vectors (database elements and the query) on a random line (different for each voter), and ranks the database elements based on the proximity of the projections to the projection of the query. The aggregation rule picks the database element that has the best median rank. This combination has several appealing features. On the theoretical side, we prove that with high probability, it produces a result that is a (1 + e) factor approximation to the Euclidean nearest neighbor. On the practical side, it turns out to be extremely efficient, often exploring no more than 5 of the data to obtain very high-quality results. This method is also database-friendly, in that it accesses data primarily in a pre-defined order without random accesses, and, unlike other methods for approximate nearest neighbors, requires almost no extra storage. Also, we extend our approach to deal with the k nearest neighbors.We conduct two sets of experiments to evaluate the efficacy of our methods. Our experiments include two scenarios where nearest neighbors are typically employed---similarity search and classification problems. In both cases, we study the performance of our methods with respect to several evaluation criteria, and conclude that they are uniformly excellent, both in terms of quality of results and in terms of efficiency. Clustering is a key data mining problem. Density and grid based technique is a popular way to mine clusters in a large multi-dimensional space wherein clusters are regarded as dense regions than their surroundings. The attribute values and ranges of these attributes characterize the clusters. Fine grid sizes lead to a huge amount of computation while coarse grid sizes result in loss in quality of clusters found. Also, varied grid sizes result in discovering clusters with different cluster descriptions. The technique of Adaptive grids enables to use grids based on the data distribution and does not require the user to specify any parameters like the grid size or the density thresholds. Further, clusters could be embedded in a subspace of a high dimensional space. We propose a modified bottom-up subspace clustering algorithm to discover clusters in all possible subspaces. Our method scales linearly with the data dimensionality and the size of the data set. Experimental results on a wide variety of synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of Adaptive grids and the effect of the modified subspace clustering algorithm. Our algorithm explores at-least an order of magnitude more number of subspaces than the original algorithm and the use of adaptive grids yields on an average of two orders of magnitude speedup as compared to the method with user specified grid size and threshold.