A comprehensive study of idistance partitioning strategies for kNN queries and high-dimensional data indexing

Abstract

Efficient database indexing and information retrieval tasks such as k-nearest neighbor (kNN) search still remain difficult challenges in large-scale and high-dimensional data. In this work, we perform the first comprehensive analysis of different partitioning strategies for the state-of-the-art high-dimensional indexing technique iDistance. This work greatly extends the discussion of why certain strategies work better than others over datasets of various distributions, dimensionality, and size. Through the use of novel partitioning strategies and extensive experimentation on real and synthetic datasets, our results establish an up-to-date iDistance benchmark for efficient kNN querying of large-scale and high-dimensional data and highlight the inherent difficulties associated with such tasks. We show that partitioning strategies can greatly affect the performance of iDistance and outline current best practices for using the indexing algorithm in modern application or comparative evaluation. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.