Answering exact reverse k-nerarest neighbors queries in metric space

Author(s)

Willian Dener de Oliveira

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC/SB)
• Defense date: 2010-03-19

Examining board members

Caetano Traina Junior; Gisele Busichia Baioco; José Antonio Fernandes de Macedo

• Advisor: Caetano Traina Junior

Abstract

Data stored in large databases present an ever increasing complexity, pressing for the development of new classes of query operators. One such class, which is enticing an increasing interest, is the so-called Similarity Queries, where the most common are the similarity range queries (\'R IND. q\') and the k-nearest neighbor queries (kNN). A k-nearest neighbor query aims at retrieving the k stored elements nearer (or more similar) to a given reference element. Another important similarity query is the reverse k-nearest neighbor (RkNN), useful both for queries posed directly by the analyst and for queries that are part of more complex analysis processes. The objective of a reverse k-nearest neighbor queries is obtaining the stored elements that has the query reference element as one of their k-nearest neighbors. As the RkNN operation is a rather expensive operation, from the computational standpoint, most existing solutions only solve the query when applied over Euclidean multidimensional spaces (as these spaces also define cardinal and topological operations besides the Euclidean distance between pairs of elements) or retrieve only approximate answers, where false negatives can occur. Several applications, like the analysis of scientific, medical, engineering or financial data, require efficient and exact answers for the RkNN queries over data which is frequently represented in metric spaces, that is where no other property besides the similarity measure exists. Therefore, for applications handling metrical data, the assumption of Euclidean metric or even multidimensional data cannot be used. In this work, we propose new pruning rules based on the law of cosines, and the RkNN-MG algorithm, which uses them to solve RkNN queries in a way that is exact, faster than the existing approaches, that is not limited for any value of k, and that can be applied both over static and over dynamic datasets. The new pruning rules assume that the data set is in a metric space that can be embedded into an Euclidean space and use metric geometry properties valid in this space to perform effective pruning based on the law of cosines combined with the traditional pruning based on the triangle inequality property. The experiments show that the new pruning rules are alkways more efficient than the traditional pruning rules based solely on the triangle inequality. The experiments show that for high high dimensionality datasets, or for metric datasets with high fractal dimensionality, the performance improvement is smaller than for for lower dimensioinality datasets, but it\'s never worse. Thus, the results confirm that the our pruning rules are efficient alternative to solve RkNN queries in general (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 07/02158-0 - Exact search operation for reverse nearest k-neighbors in metric spaces
• Grantee: Willian Dener de Oliveira
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master