Indexing Schemes for Similarity Search: an Illustrated Paradigm

We suggest a variation of the Hellerstein-Koutsoupias--Papadimitriou indexability model for datasets equipped with a similarity measure, with the aim of better understanding the structure of indexing schemes for similarity-based search and the geometry of similarity workloads. This in particular provides a unified approach to a great variety of schemes used to index into metric spaces and facilitates their transfer to more general similarity measures such as quasi-metrics. We discuss links between performance of indexing schemes and high-dimensional geometry. The concepts and results are illustrated on a very large concrete dataset of peptide fragments equipped with a quasi-metric tree indexing scheme.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: FUIN
• Authors: Vladimir Pestov, Aleksandar Stojmirovic
• Keywords: FUIN 2006, Indexing Scheme, Similarity Measure, Similarity Workloads