8,629 research outputs found
Performance comparison of point and spatial access methods
In the past few years a large number of multidimensional point access methods, also called
multiattribute index structures, has been suggested, all of them claiming good performance. Since no
performance comparison of these structures under arbitrary (strongly correlated nonuniform, short
"ugly") data distributions and under various types of queries has been performed, database
researchers and designers were hesitant to use any of these new point access methods. As shown in
a recent paper, such point access methods are not only important in traditional database applications.
In new applications such as CAD/CIM and geographic or environmental information systems, access
methods for spatial objects are needed. As recently shown such access methods are based on point
access methods in terms of functionality and performance. Our performance comparison naturally
consists of two parts. In part I we w i l l compare multidimensional point access methods, whereas in
part I I spatial access methods for rectangles will be compared. In part I we present a survey and
classification of existing point access methods. Then we carefully select the following four methods
for implementation and performance comparison under seven different data files (distributions) and
various types of queries: the 2-level grid file, the BANG file, the hB-tree and a new scheme, called
the BUDDY hash tree. We were surprised to see one method to be the clear winner which was the
BUDDY hash tree. It exhibits an at least 20 % better average performance than its competitors and is
robust under ugly data and queries. In part I I we compare spatial access methods for rectangles.
After presenting a survey and classification of existing spatial access methods we carefully selected
the following four methods for implementation and performance comparison under six different data
files (distributions) and various types of queries: the R-tree, the BANG file, PLOP hashing and the
BUDDY hash tree. The result presented two winners: the BANG file and the BUDDY hash tree.
This comparison is a first step towards a standardized testbed or benchmark. We offer our data and
query files to each designer of a new point or spatial access method such that he can run his
implementation in our testbed
Multidimensional Range Queries on Modern Hardware
Range queries over multidimensional data are an important part of database
workloads in many applications. Their execution may be accelerated by using
multidimensional index structures (MDIS), such as kd-trees or R-trees. As for
most index structures, the usefulness of this approach depends on the
selectivity of the queries, and common wisdom told that a simple scan beats
MDIS for queries accessing more than 15%-20% of a dataset. However, this wisdom
is largely based on evaluations that are almost two decades old, performed on
data being held on disks, applying IO-optimized data structures, and using
single-core systems. The question is whether this rule of thumb still holds
when multidimensional range queries (MDRQ) are performed on modern
architectures with large main memories holding all data, multi-core CPUs and
data-parallel instruction sets. In this paper, we study the question whether
and how much modern hardware influences the performance ratio between index
structures and scans for MDRQ. To this end, we conservatively adapted three
popular MDIS, namely the R*-tree, the kd-tree, and the VA-file, to exploit
features of modern servers and compared their performance to different flavors
of parallel scans using multiple (synthetic and real-world) analytical
workloads over multiple (synthetic and real-world) datasets of varying size,
dimensionality, and skew. We find that all approaches benefit considerably from
using main memory and parallelization, yet to varying degrees. Our evaluation
indicates that, on current machines, scanning should be favored over parallel
versions of classical MDIS even for very selective queries
On Stein's Identity and Near-Optimal Estimation in High-dimensional Index Models
We consider estimating the parametric components of semi-parametric multiple
index models in a high-dimensional and non-Gaussian setting. Such models form a
rich class of non-linear models with applications to signal processing, machine
learning and statistics. Our estimators leverage the score function based first
and second-order Stein's identities and do not require the covariates to
satisfy Gaussian or elliptical symmetry assumptions common in the literature.
Moreover, to handle score functions and responses that are heavy-tailed, our
estimators are constructed via carefully thresholding their empirical
counterparts. We show that our estimator achieves near-optimal statistical rate
of convergence in several settings. We supplement our theoretical results via
simulation experiments that confirm the theory
Chemoinformatics Research at the University of Sheffield: A History and Citation Analysis
This paper reviews the work of the Chemoinformatics Research Group in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, focusing particularly on the work carried out in the period 1985-2002. Four major research areas are discussed, these involving the development of methods for: substructure searching in databases of three-dimensional structures, including both rigid and flexible molecules; the representation and searching of the Markush structures that occur in chemical patents; similarity searching in databases of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures; and compound selection and the design of combinatorial libraries. An analysis of citations to 321 publications from the Group shows that it attracted a total of 3725 residual citations during the period 1980-2002. These citations appeared in 411 different journals, and involved 910 different citing organizations from 54 different countries, thus demonstrating the widespread impact of the Group's work
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