Roger Weber, Hans-J. Schek and Stephen Blott,
A Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study for
Similarity-Search Methods in High-Dimensional Spaces,
In Ashish Gupta, Oded Shmueli and Jennifer Widom eds., Proceedings of 24th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB'98),
New York, NY, USA, 24-27 August 1998.For similarity search in high-dimensional vector spaces (or ``HDVSs''), researchers have proposed a number of new methods (or adaptations of existing methods) based, in the main, on data-space partitioning. However, the performance of these methods generally degrades as dimensionality increases. Although this phenomenon-known as the ``dimensional curse''-is well known, little or no quantitative analysis of the phenomenon is available. In this paper, we provide a detailed analysis of partitioning and clustering techniques for similarity search in HDVSs. We show formally that these methods exhibit linear complexity at high dimensionality, and that existing methods are outperformed on average by a simple sequential scan if the number of dimensions exceeds around 10. Consequently, we come up with an alternative organization based on approximations to make the unavoidable sequential scan as fast as possible. We describe a simple vector approximation scheme, called VA-file, and report on an experimental evaluation of this and of two tree-based index methods (an R^*-tree and an X-tree).