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Indexing Metric Spaces for Exact Similarity Search
With the continued digitalization of societal processes, we are seeing an
explosion in available data. This is referred to as big data. In a research
setting, three aspects of the data are often viewed as the main sources of
challenges when attempting to enable value creation from big data: volume,
velocity and variety. Many studies address volume or velocity, while much fewer
studies concern the variety. Metric space is ideal for addressing variety
because it can accommodate any type of data as long as its associated distance
notion satisfies the triangle inequality. To accelerate search in metric space,
a collection of indexing techniques for metric data have been proposed.
However, existing surveys each offers only a narrow coverage, and no
comprehensive empirical study of those techniques exists. We offer a survey of
all the existing metric indexes that can support exact similarity search, by i)
summarizing all the existing partitioning, pruning and validation techniques
used for metric indexes, ii) providing the time and storage complexity analysis
on the index construction, and iii) report on a comprehensive empirical
comparison of their similarity query processing performance. Here, empirical
comparisons are used to evaluate the index performance during search as it is
hard to see the complexity analysis differences on the similarity query
processing and the query performance depends on the pruning and validation
abilities related to the data distribution. This article aims at revealing
different strengths and weaknesses of different indexing techniques in order to
offer guidance on selecting an appropriate indexing technique for a given
setting, and directing the future research for metric indexes
The Case for Learned Index Structures
Indexes are models: a B-Tree-Index can be seen as a model to map a key to the
position of a record within a sorted array, a Hash-Index as a model to map a
key to a position of a record within an unsorted array, and a BitMap-Index as a
model to indicate if a data record exists or not. In this exploratory research
paper, we start from this premise and posit that all existing index structures
can be replaced with other types of models, including deep-learning models,
which we term learned indexes. The key idea is that a model can learn the sort
order or structure of lookup keys and use this signal to effectively predict
the position or existence of records. We theoretically analyze under which
conditions learned indexes outperform traditional index structures and describe
the main challenges in designing learned index structures. Our initial results
show, that by using neural nets we are able to outperform cache-optimized
B-Trees by up to 70% in speed while saving an order-of-magnitude in memory over
several real-world data sets. More importantly though, we believe that the idea
of replacing core components of a data management system through learned models
has far reaching implications for future systems designs and that this work
just provides a glimpse of what might be possible
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