Parallel processing of nearest neighbor queries in declustered spatial data

Many large multimedia applications require efficient processing of nearest neighbor queries. Often, multimedia data are represented as a collection of important high-dimensional feature vectors. Existing Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) techniques require users to find top-k similar feature vectors for each of the feature vectors that represent the query object. This leads to wasted and redundant work due to two main reasons: 1) not all feature vectors may contribute equally in finding the top-k similar multimedia objects, and 2) feature vectors are treated independently during query processing. Additionally, there is no theoretical guarantee on the returned multimedia results. In this work, we propose a practical and efficient indexing approach for finding top-k approximate nearest neighbors for multimedia data using LSH called mmLSH, which can provide theoretical guarantees on the returned multimedia results. Additionally, we present a buffer-conscious strategy to speed up the query processing. Experimental evaluation shows significant gains in performance time and accuracy for different real multimedia datasets when compared against state-of-the-art LSH techniques.

In this paper, we identify and solve a new type of spatial queries, called continuous visible nearest neighbor (CVNN) search. Given a data set P, an obstacle set O, and a query line segment q in a two-dimensional space, a CVNN query returns a set of $${\langle p, R\rangle}$$ tuples such that $${p \in P}$$ is the nearest neighbor to every point r along the interval $${R \subseteq q}$$ as well as p is visible to r. Note that p may be NULL, meaning that all points in P are invisible to all points in R due to the obstruction of some obstacles in O. In contrast to existing continuous nearest neighbor query, CVNN retrieval considers the impact of obstacles on visibility between objects, which is ignored by most of spatial queries. We formulate the problem, analyze its unique characteristics, and develop efficient algorithms for exact CVNN query processing. Our methods (1) utilize conventional data-partitioning indices (e.g., R-trees) on both P and O, (2) tackle the CVNN search by performing a single query for the entire query line segment, and (3) only access the data points and obstacles relevant to the final query result by employing a suite of effective pruning heuristics. In addition, several interesting variations of CVNN queries have been introduced, and they can be supported by our techniques, which further demonstrates the flexibility of the proposed algorithms. A comprehensive experimental evaluation using both real and synthetic data sets has been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our proposed pruning heuristics and the performance of our proposed algorithms.

Developed from Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, Aggregate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) queries return the object that minimizes an aggregate distance function with respect to a set of query points. Because of the multiple query points, ANN queries are much more complex than NN queries. For optimizing the query processing and improving the query efficiency, many ANN queries algorithms utilizes pruning strategies, with or without an index structure. Obviously, the pruning effect highly depends on the tightness of the bound estimation. In this paper, we figure out a property in vector space and develop some efficient bound estimations for two most popular types of ANN queries. Based on these bounds, we design the indexed and non-index ANN algorithms, and conduct experimental studies. Our algorithms show good performance, especially for high dimensional queries, for both real dataset and synthetic datasets.

Nowadays, many applications return to the user a set of results that take the query as their nearest neighbor, which are commonly expressed through reverse nearest neighbor (RNN) queries. When considering moving objects, users would like to find objects that appear in the RNN result set for a period of time in some real-world applications such as collaboration recommendation and anti-tracking. In this work, we formally define the problem of interval reverse nearest neighbor (IRNN) queries over moving objects, which return the objects that maintain nearest neighboring relations to the moving query objects for the longest time in the given interval. Location uncertainty of moving data objects and moving query objects is inherent in various domains, and we investigate objects that exhibit Markov correlations, that is, each object's location is only correlated with its own location at previous timestamp while being independent of other objects. There exists the efficiency challenge for answering IRNN queries on uncertain moving objects with Markov correlations since we have to retrieve not only all the possible locations of each object at current time but also its historically possible locations. To speed up the query processing, we present a general framework for answering IRNN queries on uncertain moving objects with Markov correlations in two phases. In the first phase, we apply space pruning and probability pruning techniques, which reduce the search space significantly. In the second phase, we verify whether each unpruned object is an IRNN of the query object. During this phase, we propose an approach termed Probability Decomposition Verification (PDV) algorithm which avoid computing the probability of any object being an RNN of the query object exactly and thus improve the efficiency of verification. The performance of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets, and the experimental results show that our algorithm is more efficient than the Monte-Carlo based approximate algorithm.

A range nearest-neighbor (RNN) query retrieves the nearest neighbor (NN) for every point in a range. It is a natural generalization of point and continuous nearest-neighbor queries and has many applications. In this paper, we consider the ranges as (hyper)rectangles and propose efficient in-memory processing and secondary memory pruning techniques for RNN queries in both 2D and high-dimensional spaces. These techniques are generalized for kRNN queries, which return the k nearest neighbors for every point in the range. In addition, we devise an auxiliary solution-based index EXO-tree to speed up any type of NN query. EXO-tree is orthogonal to any existing NN processing algorithm and, thus, can be transparently integrated. An extensive empirical study was conducted to evaluate the CPU and I/O performance of these techniques, and the study showed that they are efficient and robust under various data sets, query ranges, numbers of nearest neighbors, dimensions, and cache sizes.

The great advances in deep learning enable human beings to extract the semantic information in ubiquitous unstructured data into high-dimensional vectors, leading to an urgent priority of managing vector data. Nearest neighbor (NN) query is a pivotal question in vector data management. Unfortunately, the NN query has been proved to be intrinsically hard. Researchers, thus, turn to approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) query which targets better efficiency by slightly compromising accuracy. Despite this, existing ANN methods still incur high time and space costs, which are mainly due to the high dimensionality. Specifically, in most in-memory ANN algorithms, the time cost is dominated by the time for comparing the distances among vectors. Each distance comparison operation (DCO) involves hundreds of arithmetic operations as each vector has hundreds of dimensions. Similarly, the space cost is dominated by the space for storing the vectors. Towards the goal of reducing the time and space costs, we present three methods in this thesis. First, we observe that, for a DCO, if an approximate distance can confirm that a vector is not a NN, then it can be discarded without computing exact distances. Based on this observation, we propose a method named ADSampling. For a DCO, it iteratively and incrementally samples a few dimensions and computes an approximate distance. When this distance is accurate enough to decide the result of the DCO, it terminates sampling. Second, to further improve the efficiency of DCOs, we design an efficient distance estimator. We propose a new quantization method named RaBitQ, which maps $D$-dimensional vectors into $D$-bit strings. RaBitQ provides an unbiased and asymptotically optimal estimator with good empirical accuracy. In addition, we introduce efficient implementations of RaBitQ based on bitwise operations or SIMD-based operations. Third, by extending the RaBitQ method, we develop an algorithm which compresses a floating-point vector into a $B$-bit unsigned integer vector. We prove that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal in terms of the space-accuracy trade-off.

Case Based Reasoning (CBR) is a method that aims to resolve a new case by adapting the solutions contained in previous cases that are similar to the new case. The system built in this study is the CBR system to make recommendations on the topic of student thesis concentration. This study used data from undergraduate students of Informatics Engineering IST AKPRIND Yogyakarta with a total of 115 data consisting of 80 training data and 35 test data. This study aims to design and build a Case Based Reasoning system using the Nearest Neighbor and Manhattan Distance Similarity Methods, and to compare the results of the accuracy value using the Nearest Neighbor Similarity and Manhattan Distance Similarity methods. The recommendation process is carried out by calculating the value of closeness or similarity between new cases and old cases stored on a case basis using the Nearest Neighbor Method and Manhattan Distance. The features used in this study consisted of GPA and course grades. The case taken is the case with the highest similarity value. If a case doesnt get a topic recommendation or is less than the trashold value of 0.8, a case revision will be carried out by an expert. Successfully revised cases are stored in the system to be made new knowledge. The test results using the Nearest Neighbor Method get an accuracy value of 97.14% and Manhattan Distance Method 94.29%.

The k nearest neighbor (KNN) query, an essential query for information processing in sensor networks, has not received sufficient attention in the research community of sensor networks. In this paper, we examine in-network processing of KNN queries by proposing two alternative algorithms, namely the GeoRouting Tree (GRT) and the KNN Boundary Tree (KBT). The former is based on a distributed spatial index structure and prunes off the irrelevant nodes during query propagation. The latter is based upon ad-hoc geographic routing and first obtains a region within which at least k nearest sensor nodes are enclosed and then decides the k nearest nodes to the query point. We provide an extensive performance evaluation to study the impact of various system factors and protocol parameters. Our results show that GRT yields a good tradeoff between energy consumption and query accuracy in static scenarios. On the other hand, KBT achieves better energy efficiency while being more tolerant to network dynamics.

Broadcasting data with an index is an effective way to disseminate public information to a large clients. For a server, using multiple channels to provide services (e.g., location-based services) makes the broadcast cycle shorter than using one channel. Among location-based services, the k nearest neighbors (k-NN) search is an important one and finds the fc closest objects to a query point in a multi-dimensional space. This paper considers k nearest neighbors search on a broadcast R-tree in a multi-channel environment. We assume that a mobile client can only tune into a specified channel at one time instance. We study how a server generates the broadcast schedules on multiple channels and explore how a client executes the k-NN search on the broadcast. Different broadcast schedules with the client k-NN search processing makes different k-NN search protocols. The objectives of the protocols is to minimize the latency (i.e., the time elapsed between issuing and termination of the query), tuning time (i.e., the amount of time spent on listening to the channel), and the memory usage for k-NN search processing. Last, we present our experiments and the experiment results validate that our mechanisms achieve the objectives.

Spatial interpolations are commonly used in geometric modeling for life science applications. In large-scale spatial interpolations, it is always needed to find a local set of data points for each interpolated point using the k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) search procedure. To improve the computational efficiency of kNN search, spatial decomposition structures such as grids and trees are employed to fastly locate the nearest neighbors. Among those spatial decomposition structures, the uniform grid is the simplest one, and the size of the grid cell could strongly affect the efficiency of kNN search. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of the size of uniform grid cell on the efficiency of kNN search. Our objective is to find the relatively optimal size of grid cell by considering the distribution of scattered points (i.e., the data points and the interpolated points). We employ the Standard Deviation of points’ coordinates to measure the spatial distribution of scattered points. For the irregularly distributed scattered points, we perform several series of kNN search procedures in two dimensions. Benchmark results indicate that: in two dimensions, with the increase of the Standard Deviation of points’ coordinates, the relatively optimal size of the grid cell decreases and eventually converges. The relationships between the Standard Deviation of scattered points’ coordinates and the relatively optimal size of grid cell are also fitted. The fitted relationships could be applied to determine the relatively optimal grid cell in kNN search, and further, improve the computational efficiency of spatial interpolations.

Here we report PPB2 as a target prediction tool assigning targets to a query molecule based on ChEMBL data. PPB2 computes ligand similarities using molecular fingerprints encoding composition (MQN), molecular shape and pharmacophores (Xfp), and substructures (ECfp4) and features an unprecedented combination of nearest neighbor (NN) searches and Naı̈ve Bayes (NB) machine learning, together with simple NN searches, NB and Deep Neural Network (DNN) machine learning models as further options. Although NN(ECfp4) gives the best results in terms of recall in a 10-fold cross-validation study, combining NN searches with NB machine learning provides superior precision statistics, as well as better results in a case study predicting off-targets of a recently reported TRPV6 calcium channel inhibitor, illustrating the value of this combined approach. PPB2 is available to assess possible off-targets of small molecule drug-like compounds by public access at http://gdb.unibe.ch .

In this paper, we study the problem of continuous monitoring of reverse k nearest neighbors queries in Euclidean space as well as in spatial networks. Existing techniques are sensitive toward objects and queries movement. For example, the results of a query are to be recomputed whenever the query changes its location. We present a framework for continuous reverse k nearest neighbor (RkNN) queries by assigning each object and query with a safe region such that the expensive recomputation is not required as long as the query and objects remain in their respective safe regions. This significantly improves the computation cost. As a byproduct, our framework also reduces the communication cost in client---server architectures because an object does not report its location to the server unless it leaves its safe region or the server sends a location update request. We also conduct a rigid cost analysis for our Euclidean space RkNN algorithm. We show that our techniques can also be applied to answer bichromatic RkNN queries in Euclidean space as well as in spatial networks. Furthermore, we show that our techniques can be extended for the spatial networks that are represented by directed graphs. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our techniques outperform the existing techniques by an order of magnitude in terms of computation cost and communication cost.

Nearest neighbor search is a fundamental problem in computer vision and machine learning. The straightforward solution, linear scan, is both computationally and memory intensive in large scale high-dimensional cases, hence is not preferable in practice. Therefore, there have been a lot of interests in algorithms that perform approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. In this paper, we propose a novel addition-based vector quantization algorithm, Asymmetric Mapping Quantization (AMQ), to efficiently conduct ANN search. Unlike existing addition-based quantization methods that suffer from handling the problem caused by the norm of database vector, we map the query vector and database vector using different mapping functions to transform the computation of L-2 distance to inner product similarity, thus do not need to evaluate the norm of database vector. Moreover, we further propose Distributed Asymmetric Mapping Quantization (DAMQ) to enable AMQ to work on very large dataset by distributed learning. Extensive experiments on approximate nearest neighbor search and image retrieval validate the merits of the proposed AMQ and DAMQ.

Due to the explosive increase of data in both the aspects of dimensionality and volume, performing $k$ nearest neighbors search over cloud environments has been progressively receiving more attention among researchers in the field of database cloud computing. However, the key challenge for switching $k$ nearest neighbors search from the local server (i.e., traditional way) to the third-party cloud is, that the database which always contains series of sensitive information has to be kept secret against the cloud. In this work, we present a pair of solutions towards Secure $k$ Nearest Neighbors (S $k$ NN) query in outsourced environments. By skillfully utilizing coarse quantization and the cryptography techniques Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Paillier homomorphic encryption, we construct a secure Inverted File (IVF) and compute encrypted approximate distances directly to search for high-dimensional data in the third-party cloud provider, and finally find the better tradeoff between the search quality and security. Empirical study over real datasets and practical environments validate our solutions’ feasibility, completeness, and practicality. Compared to the state-of-the-art, the proposed solutions resolve the S $k$ NN of high-dimensional data novelly, have very limited response time and provide high privacy protection on the side of both the User and the cloud provider.

Nearest neighbor search, a classic way of identifying similar data, can be applied to various areas, including database, machine learning, natural language processing, software engineering, etc. Secure nearest neighbor search aims to find nearest neighbors to a given query point over encrypted data without accessing data in plaintext. It provides privacy protection to datasets when nearest neighbor queries need to be operated by an untrusted party (e.g., a public server). While different solutions have been proposed to support nearest neighbor queries on encrypted data, these existing solutions still encounter critical drawbacks either in efficiency or privacy. In light of the limitations in the current literature, we propose a novel approximate nearest neighbor search solution, referred to as Sparser, by leveraging a combination of space-filling curves, perturbation, and Order-Preserving Encryption. The advantages of Sparser are twofold, strengthening privacy and improving efficiency. Specifically, Sparser pre-processes plaintext data with space-filling curves and perturbation, such that data is sparse, which mitigates leakage abuse attacks and renders stronger privacy. In addition to privacy enhancement, Sparser can efficiently find approximate nearest neighbors over encrypted data with logarithmic time. Through extensive experiments over real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Sparser can achieve strong privacy protection under leakage abuse attacks and minimize search time.