Indexing Schemes for Similarity Search: an Illustrated Paradigm

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Pestov, Vladimir | Stojmirović, Aleksandar

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. E-mails: vpest283@uottawa.ca; astojmir@uottawa.ca

Abstract: We suggest a variation of the Hellerstein – Koutsoupias – Papadimitriou indexability model for datasets equipped with a similarity measure, with the aim of better understanding the structure of indexing schemes for similarity-based search and the geometry of similarity workloads. This in particular provides a unified approach to a great variety of schemes used to index into metric spaces and facilitates their transfer to more general similarity measures such as quasi-metrics. We discuss links between performance of indexing schemes and high-dimensional geometry. The concepts and results are illustrated on a very large concrete dataset of peptide fragments equipped with a biologically significant similarity measure.

Keywords: Similarity workload, metrics, quasi-metrics, indexing schemes, the curse of dimensionality

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 70, no. 4, pp. 367-385, 2006