Dynamic Enumeration of Similarity Joins


Abstract in English

This paper considers enumerating answers to similarity-join queries under dynamic updates: Given two sets of $n$ points $A,B$ in $mathbb{R}^d$, a metric $phi(cdot)$, and a distance threshold $r > 0$, report all pairs of points $(a, b) in A times B$ with $phi(a,b) le r$. Our goal is to store $A,B$ into a dynamic data structure that, whenever asked, can enumerate all result pairs with worst-case delay guarantee, i.e., the time between enumerating two consecutive pairs is bounded. Furthermore, the data structure can be efficiently updated when a point is inserted into or deleted from $A$ or $B$. We propose several efficient data structures for answering similarity-join queries in low dimension. For exact enumeration of similarity join, we present near-linear-size data structures for $ell_1, ell_infty$ metrics with $log^{O(1)} n$ update time and delay. We show that such a data structure is not feasible for the $ell_2$ metric for $d ge 4$. For approximate enumeration of similarity join, where the distance threshold is a soft constraint, we obtain a unified linear-size data structure for $ell_p$ metric, with $log^{O(1)} n$ delay and update time. In high dimensions, we present an efficient data structure with worst-case delay-guarantee using locality sensitive hashing (LSH).

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