Disorder inequality: a combinatorial approach to nearest neighbor search

Abstract

We say that an algorithm for nearest neighbor search is combinatorial if only direct comparisons between two pairwise similarity values are allowed. Combinatorial algorithms for nearest neighbor search have two important advantages: (1) they do not map similarity values to artificial distance values and do not use the triangle inequality for the latter, and (2) they work for arbitrarily complicated data representations and similarity functions. In this paper we introduce a special property of the similarity function on a set S that leads to efficient combinatorial algorithms for S. The disorder constant D(S) of a set S is defined to ensure the following inequality: if x is the a'th most similar object to z and y is the b'th most similar object to z, then x is among the D(S) (a + b) most similar objects to y. Assuming that disorder is small we present the first two known combinatorial algorithms for nearest neighbors whose query time has logarithmic dependence on the size of S. The first one, called Ranwalk, is a randomized zero-error algorithm that always returns the exact nearest neighbor. It uses space quadratic in the input size in preprocessing, but is very efficient in query processing. The second algorithm, called Arwalk, uses near-linear space. It uses random choices in preprocessing, but the query processing is essentially deterministic. For an arbitrary query q, there is only a small probability that the chosen data structure does not support q. Finally, we show that for the Reuters corpus average disorder is indeed quite small and that Ranwalk efficiently computes the nearest neighbor in most cases.