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Metric index: an efficient and scalable solution for precise and approximate similarity search

Basic information
Original title:Metric index: an efficient and scalable solution for precise and approximate similarity search
Authors:David Novák, Michal Batko, Pavel Zezula
Further information
Citation:NOVÁK, David - BATKO, Michal - ZEZULA, Pavel. Metric index: an efficient and scalable solution for precise and approximate similarity search. Information Systems, Elsevier, The Nederlands. ISSN 0306-4379, 2011, vol. 36, no. 4, pp. 721-733.
Original language:English
Field:Informatika
WWW:link to a new windowhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2010.10.002
Type:Article in Periodical
Keywords:Metric space; Similarity search; Data structure; Approximation; Scalability

Metric space is a universal and versatile model of similarity that can be applied in various areas of information retrieval. However, a general, efficient, and scalable solution for metric data management is still a resisting research challenge. We introduce a novel indexing and searching mechanism called Metric Index (M-Index) that employs practically all known principles of metric space partitioning, pruning, and filtering, thus reaching high search performance while having constant building costs per object. The heart of the M-Index is a general mapping mechanism that enables to actually store the data in established structures such as the B+ - tree or even in a distributed storage. We implemented the M-Index with the B+ - tree and performed experiments on two datasets - the first is an artificial set of vectors and the other is a real-life dataset composed of a combination of five MPEG-7 visual descriptors extracted from a database of up to several million digital images. The experiments put several M-Index variants under test and compare them with established techniques for both precise and approximate similarity search. The trials show that the M-Index outperforms the others in terms of efficiency of search-space pruning, I/O costs, and response times for precise similarity queries. Further, the M-Index demonstrates excellent ability to keep similar data close in the index which makes its approximation algorithm very efficient - maintaining practically constant response times while preserving a very high recall as the dataset grows and even beating approaches designed purely for approximate search.

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