Nearest neighbor search with multiple random projection trees : core method and improvements

Nearest neighbor search is a crucial tool in computer science and a part of many machine learning algorithms, the most obvious example being the venerable k-NN classifier. More generally, nearest neighbors have usages in numerous fields such as classification, regression, computer vision, recommendation systems, robotics and compression to name just a few examples. In general, nearest neighbor problems cannot be answered in sublinear time – to identify the actual nearest data points, clearly all objects have to be accessed at least once. However, in the class of applications where nearest neighbor searches are repeatedly made within a fixed data set that is available upfront, such as recommendation systems (Spotify, e-commerce, etc.), we can do better. In a computationally expensive offline phase the data set is indexed with a data structure, and in the online phase the index is used to answer nearest neighbor queries at a superior rate. The cost of indexing is usually much larger than that of performing a single query, but with a high number of queries the initial indexing cost gets eventually compensated. The urge for efficient index structures for nearest neighbors search has sparked a lot of research and hundreds of papers have been published to date. We look into the class of structures called binary space partitioning trees, specifically the random projection tree. Random projection trees have favorable properties especially when working with data sets with low intrinsic dimensionality. However, they have rarely been used in real-life nearest neighbor solutions due to limiting factors such as the relatively high cost of projection computations in high dimensional spaces. We present a new index structure for approximate nearest neighbor search that consists of multiple random projection trees, and several variants of algorithms to use it for efficient nearest neighbor search. We start by specifying our variant of the random projection tree and show how to construct an index of multiple random projection trees (MRPT), along with a simple query that combines the results from independent random projection trees to achieve much higher query accuracy with faster query times. This is followed by discussion of further methods to optimize accuracy and storage. The focus will be on algorithmic details, accompanied by a thorough analysis of memory and time complexity. Finally we will show experimentally that a real-life implementation of these ideas leads to an algorithm that achieves faster query times than the currently available open source libraries for high-recall approximate nearest neighbor search

Space Efficient Encodings for Bit-strings, Range queries and Related Problems

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2016. 2. Srinivasa Rao Satti.In this thesis, we design and implement various space efficient data structures. Most of these structures use spaces close to the information-theoretic lower bound while supporting the queries efficiently. In particular, this thesis is concerned with the data structures for four problems: (i) supporting \rank{} and \select{} queries on compressed bit strings, (ii) nearest larger neighbor problem, (iii) simultaneous encodings for range and next/previous larger/smaller value queries, and (iv) range \topk{} queries on two-dimensional arrays. We first consider practical implementations of \emph{compressed} bitvectors, which support \rank{} and \select{} operations on a given bit-string, while storing the bit-string in compressed form~\cite{DBLP:conf/dcc/JoJORS14}. Our approach relies on \emph{variable-to-fixed} encodings of the bit-string, an approach that has not yet been considered systematically for practical encodings of bitvectors. We show that this approach leads to fast practical implementations with low \emph{redundancy} (i.e., the space used by the bitvector in addition to the compressed representation of the bit-string), and is a flexible and promising solution to the problem of supporting \rank{} and \select{} on moderately compressible bit-strings, such as those encountered in real-world applications. Next, we propose space-efficient data structures for the nearest larger neighbor problem~\cite{IWOCA2014,walcom-JoRS15}. Given a sequence of $n$ elements from a total order, and a position in the sequence, the nearest larger neighbor (\NLV{}) query returns the position of the element which is closest to the query position, and is larger than the element at the query position. The problem of finding all nearest larger neighbors has attracted interest due to its applications for parenthesis matching and in computational geometry~\cite{AsanoBK09,AsanoK13,BerkmanSV93}. We consider a data structure version of this problem, which is to preprocess a given sequence of elements to construct a data structure that can answer \NLN{} queries efficiently. For one-dimensional arrays, we give time-space tradeoffs for the problem on \textit{indexing model}. For two-dimensional arrays, we give an optimal encoding with constant query on \textit{encoding model}. We also propose space-efficient encodings which support various range queries, and previous and next smaller/larger value queries~\cite{cocoonJS15}. Given a sequence of $n$ elements from a total order, we obtain a $4.088n + o(n)$-bit encoding that supports all these queries where $n$ is the length of input array. For the case when we need to support all these queries in constant time, we give an encoding that takes $4.585n + o(n)$ bits. This improves the $5.08n+o(n)$-bit encoding obtained by encoding the colored $2d$-Min and $2d$-Max heaps proposed by Fischer~\cite{Fischer11}. We extend the original DFUDS~\cite{BDMRRR05} encoding of the colored $2d$-Min and $2d$-Max heap that supports the queries in constant time. Then, we combine the extended DFUDS of $2d$-Min heap and $2d$-Max heap using the Min-Max encoding of Gawrychowski and Nicholson~\cite{Gawry14} with some modifications. We also obtain encodings that take lesser space and support a subset of these queries. Finally, we consider the various encodings that support range \topk{} queries on a two-dimensional array containing elements from a total order. For an $m \times n$ array, we first propose an optimal encoding for answering one-sided \topk{} queries, whose query range is restricted to $[1 \dots m][1 \dots a]$, for $1 \le a \le n$. Next, we propose an encoding for the general \topk{} queries that takes $m^2\lg{{(k+1)n \choose n}} + m\lg{m}+o(n)$ bits. This generalizes the \topk{} encoding of Gawrychowski and Nicholson~\cite{Gawry14}.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Computational model 2 1.1.1 Encoding and indexing models 2 1.2 Contribution of the thesis 3 1.3 Organization of the thesis 5 Chapter 2 Preliminaries 7 Chapter 3 Compressed bit vectors based on variable-to-fixed encodings 10 3.1 Introduction 10 3.2 Bit-vectors using V2F coding 14 3.3 V2F compression algorithms for bit-strings 16 3.3.1 Tunstall code 16 3.3.2 Enumerative codes 19 3.3.3 LZW algorithm 23 3.3.4 Empirical evaluation of the compressors 23 3.4 Practical implementation of bitvectors based on V2F compression. 26 3.4.1 Testing Methodology 29 3.4.2 Results of Empirical Evaluation 33 3.5 Future works 35 Chapter 4 Space Efficient Data Structures for Nearest Larger Neighbor 39 4.1 Introduction 39 4.2 Indexing NLV queries on 1D arrays 43 4.3 Encoding NLN queries on2D binary arrays 44 4.4 Encoding NLN queries for general 2D arrays 50 4.4.1 2D NLN in the encoding model–distinct case 50 4.4.2 2D NLN in the encoding model–general case 53 4.5 Open problems 63 Chapter 5 Simultaneous encodings for range and next/previous larger/smaller value queries 64 5.1 Introduction 64 5.2 Preliminaries 67 5.2.1 2d-Min heap 69 5.2.2 Encoding range min-max queries 72 5.3 Extended DFUDS for colored 2d-Min heap 75 5.4 Encoding colored 2d-Min and 2d-Max heaps 80 5.4.1 Combined data structure for DCMin(A) and DCMax(A) 82 5.4.2 Encoding colored 2d-Min and 2d-Max heaps using less space 88 5.5 Open problems 89 Chapter 6 Encoding Two-dimensional range Top-k queries 90 6.1 Introduction 90 6.2 Encoding one-sided range Top-k queries on 2D array 92 6.3 Encoding general range Top-k queries on 2D array 95 6.4 Open problems 99 Chapter 7 Conculsion 100 Bibliography 103 요약 112Docto

HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces

Nearest neighbor searching of large databases in high-dimensional spaces is inherently difficult due to the curse of dimensionality. A flavor of approximation is, therefore, necessary to practically solve the problem of nearest neighbor search. In this paper, we propose a novel yet simple indexing scheme, HD-Index, to solve the problem of approximate k-nearest neighbor queries in massive high-dimensional databases. HD-Index consists of a set of novel hierarchical structures called RDB-trees built on Hilbert keys of database objects. The leaves of the RDB-trees store distances of database objects to reference objects, thereby allowing efficient pruning using distance filters. In addition to triangular inequality, we also use Ptolemaic inequality to produce better lower bounds. Experiments on massive (up to billion scale) high-dimensional (up to 1000+) datasets show that HD-Index is effective, efficient, and scalable.Comment: PVLDB 11(8):906-919, 201

Angle Tree: Nearest Neighbor Search in High Dimensions with Low Intrinsic Dimensionality

We propose an extension of tree-based space-partitioning indexing structures for data with low intrinsic dimensionality embedded in a high dimensional space. We call this extension an Angle Tree. Our extension can be applied to both classical kd-trees as well as the more recent rp-trees. The key idea of our approach is to store the angle (the "dihedral angle") between the data region (which is a low dimensional manifold) and the random hyperplane that splits the region (the "splitter"). We show that the dihedral angle can be used to obtain a tight lower bound on the distance between the query point and any point on the opposite side of the splitter. This in turn can be used to efficiently prune the search space. We introduce a novel randomized strategy to efficiently calculate the dihedral angle with a high degree of accuracy. Experiments and analysis on real and synthetic data sets shows that the Angle Tree is the most efficient known indexing structure for nearest neighbor queries in terms of preprocessing and space usage while achieving high accuracy and fast search time.Comment: To be submitted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc

Analysis of approximate nearest neighbor searching with clustered point sets

We present an empirical analysis of data structures for approximate nearest neighbor searching. We compare the well-known optimized kd-tree splitting method against two alternative splitting methods. The first, called the sliding-midpoint method, which attempts to balance the goals of producing subdivision cells of bounded aspect ratio, while not producing any empty cells. The second, called the minimum-ambiguity method is a query-based approach. In addition to the data points, it is also given a training set of query points for preprocessing. It employs a simple greedy algorithm to select the splitting plane that minimizes the average amount of ambiguity in the choice of the nearest neighbor for the training points. We provide an empirical analysis comparing these two methods against the optimized kd-tree construction for a number of synthetically generated data and query sets. We demonstrate that for clustered data and query sets, these algorithms can provide significant improvements over the standard kd-tree construction for approximate nearest neighbor searching.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. Presented at ALENEX '99, Baltimore, MD, Jan 15-16, 199