Abstract

Consider a set S of n data points in real d-dimensional space, R d , where distances are measured using any Minkowski metric. In nearest neighbor searching we preprocess S into a data structure, so that given any query point q 2 R d , the closest point of S to q can be reported quickly. Given any positive real ffl, a data point p is a (1 + ffl)-approximate nearest neighbor of q if its distance from q is within a factor of (1 + ffl) of the distance to the true nearest neighbor. We show that it is possible to preprocess a set of n points in R d in O(dn log n) time and O(dn) space, so that given a query point q 2 R d , and ffl ? 0, a (1 + ffl)-approximate nearest neighbor of q can be computed in O(c d;ffl log n) time, where c d;ffl d d1 + 6d=ffle d is a factor depending only on dimension and ffl. In general, we show that given an integer k 1, (1 + ffl)-approximations to the k nearest neighbors of q can be computed in additional O(kd log n) time.

Citations