An index structure for efficient reverse nearest neighbor queries

Abstract

The Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN) problem is to find all points in a given data set whose nearest neighbor is a given query point. Just like the Nearest Neighbor (NN) queries, the RNN queries appear in many practical situations such as marketing and resource management. Thus, efficient methods for the RNN queries in databases are required. The paper introduces a new index structure, the Rdnn-tree, that answers both RNN and NN queries efficiently. A single index structure is employed for a dynamic database, in contrast to the use of multiple indexes in previous work. This leads to significant savings in dynamically maintaining the index structure. The Rdnn-tree outperforms existing methods in various aspects. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data show that our index structure outperforms previous methods by a significant margin (more than 90% in terms of number of leaf nodes accessed) in RNN queries. It also shows improvement in NN queries over standard techniques. Furthermore, performance in insertion and deletion is significantly enhanced by the ability to combine multiple queries (NN and RNN) in one traversal of the tree. These facts make our index structure extremely preferable in both static and dynamic cases.