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Similarity search problems in high-dimensional data arise in many areas of computer science such as data bases, image analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. One of the most prominent problems is finding the k nearest neighbors of a data point q ∈ ℝ^d in a large set of data points S ⊂ ℝ^d, under same distance measure such as Euclidean distance. In contrast to lower dimensional settings, we do not know of worst-case efficient data structures for such search problems in high-dimensional data, i.e., data structures that are faster than a linear scan through the data set. However, there is a rich body of (often heuristic) approaches that solve nearest neighbor search problems much faster than such a scan on many real-world data sets. As a necessity, the term solve means that these approaches give approximate results that are close to the true k-nearest neighbors. In this talk, we survey recent approaches to nearest neighbor search and related problems. The talk consists of three parts: (1) What makes nearest neighbor search difficult? (2) How do current state-of-the-art algorithms work? (3) What are recent advances regarding similarity search on GPUs, in distributed settings, or in external memory?
@InProceedings{aumuller:LIPIcs.SEA.2020.1,
author = {Aum\"{u}ller, Martin},
title = {{Algorithm Engineering for High-Dimensional Similarity Search Problems}},
booktitle = {18th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2020)},
pages = {1:1--1:3},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-148-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {160},
editor = {Faro, Simone and Cantone, Domenico},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2020.1},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-120751},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2020.1},
annote = {Keywords: Nearest neighbor search, Benchmarking}
}