HI-Sky: Hash index-based skyline query processing

Abstract

The skyline query has recently attracted a considerable amount of research interest in several fields. The query conducts computations using the domination test, where "domination" means that a data point does not have a worse value than others in any dimension, and has a better value in at least one dimension. Therefore, the skyline query can be used to construct efficient queries based on data from a variety of fields. However, when the number of dimensions or the amount of data increases, naive skyline queries lead to a degradation in overall performance owing to the higher cost of comparisons among data. Several methods using index structures have been proposed to solve this problem but have not improved the performance of skyline queries because their indices are heavily influenced by the dimensionality and data amount. Therefore, in this study, we propose HI-Sky, a method that can perform quick skyline computations by using the hash index to overcome the above shortcomings. HI-Sky effectively manages data through the hash index and significantly improves performance by effectively eliminating unnecessary data comparisons when computing the skyline. We provide the theoretical background for HI-Sky and verify its improvement in skyline query performance through comparisons with prevalent methods.