Algorithms for Nearest Neighbor Search.ppt

Algorithms for Nearest Neighbor Search Piotr Indyk MIT Nearest Neighbor Search Given: a set P of n points in Rd Goal: a data structure, which given a query point q, finds the nearest neighbor p of q in P Outline of this talk Variants Motivation Main memory algorithms: quadtrees kd-trees Locality Sensitive Hashing Secondary storage algorithms: R-tree (and its variants) VA-file Variants of nearest neighbor Near neighbor (range search): find one/all points in P within distance r from q Spatial join: given two sets P,Q, find all pairs p in P, q in Q, such that p is within distance r from q Approximate near neighbor: find one/all points p’ in P, whose distance to q is at most (1+e) times the distance from q to its nearest neighbor Motivation Depends on the value of d: low d: graphics, vision, GIS, etc high d: similarity search in databases (text, images etc) finding pairs of similar objects (e.g., copyright violation detection) useful subroutine for clustering Algorithms Main memory (Computational Geometry) linear scan tree-based: quadtree kd-tree hashing-based: Locality-Sensitive Hashing Secondary storage (Databases) R-tree (and numerous variants) Vector Approximation File (VA-file) Quadtree Simplest spatial structure on Earth ! Quadtree ctd. Split the space into 2d equal subsquares Repeat until done: only one pixel left only one point left only a few points left Variants: split only one dimension at a time k-d-trees (in a moment) Range search Near neighbor (range search): put the root on the stack repeat pop the next node T from the stack for each child C of T: if C is a leaf, examine point(s) in C if C intersects with the ball of radius r around q, add C to the stack Near neighbor ctd Nearest neighbor Start range search with r = ? Whenever a point is found, update r Only investigate nodes with respect to current r Quadtree ctd. Simple data structure Versatile, easy to implement So why doesn’t this talk end here ? Empty spaces: if the points form sparse clouds,