Indexing and querying constantly evolving data using time series analysis

Abstract

This paper introduces a new approach for efficiently indexing and querying constantly evolving data. Traditional data index structures suffer from frequent updating cost and result in unsatisfactory performance when data changes constantly. Existing approaches try to reduce index updating cost by using a simple linear or recursive function to define the data evolution, however, in many applications, the data evolution is far too complex to be accurately described by a simple function. We propose to take each constantly evolving data as a time series and use the ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) methodology to analyze and model it. The model enables making effective forecasts for the data. The index is developed based on the forecasting intervals. As long as the data changes within its corresponding forecasting interval, only its current value in the leaf node needs to be updated and no further update needs to be done to the index structure. The model parameters and the index structure can be dynamically adjusted. Experiments show that the forecasting interval index (FI-Index) significantly outperforms traditional indexes in a high updating environment. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.