No Arabic abstract
We consider a similarity measure between two sets $A$ and $B$ of vectors, that balances the average and maximum cosine distance between pairs of vectors, one from set $A$ and one from set $B$. As a motivation for this measure, we present lineage tracking in a database. To practically realize this measure, we need an approximate search algorithm that given a set of vectors $A$ and sets of vectors $B_1,...,B_n$, the algorithm quickly locates the set $B_i$ that maximizes the similarity measure. For the case where all sets are singleton sets, essentially each is a single vector, there are known efficient approximate search algorithms, e.g., approximat
Approximate nearest neighbor algorithms are used to speed up nearest neighbor search in a wide array of applications. However, current indexing methods feature several hyperparameters that need to be tuned to reach an acceptable accuracy--speed trade-off. A grid search in the parameter space is often impractically slow due to a time-consuming index-building procedure. Therefore, we propose an algorithm for automatically tuning the hyperparameters of indexing methods based on randomized space-partitioning trees. In particular, we present results using randomized k-d trees, random projection trees and randomized PCA trees. The tuning algorithm adds minimal overhead to the index-building process but is able to find the optimal hyperparameters accurately. We demonstrate that the algorithm is significantly faster than existing approaches, and that the indexing methods used are competitive with the state-of-the-art methods in query time while being faster to build.
We study the problem of learning the causal relationships between a set of observed variables in the presence of latents, while minimizing the cost of interventions on the observed variables. We assume access to an undirected graph $G$ on the observed variables whose edges represent either all direct causal relationships or, less restrictively, a superset of causal relationships (identified, e.g., via conditional independence tests or a domain expert). Our goal is to recover the directions of all causal or ancestral relations in $G$, via a minimum cost set of interventions. It is known that constructing an exact minimum cost intervention set for an arbitrary graph $G$ is NP-hard. We further argue that, conditioned on the hardness of approximate graph coloring, no polynomial time algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than $Theta(log n)$, where $n$ is the number of observed variables in $G$. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a bi-criteria approximation goal that lets us recover the directions of all but $epsilon n^2$ edges in $G$, for some specified error parameter $epsilon > 0$. Under this relaxed goal, we give polynomial time algorithms that achieve intervention cost within a small constant factor of the optimal. Our algorithms combine work on efficient intervention design and the design of low-cost separating set systems, with ideas from the literature on graph property testing.
Graph search is one of the most successful algorithmic trends in near neighbor search. Several of the most popular and empirically successful algorithms are, at their core, a simple walk along a pruned near neighbor graph. Such algorithms consistently perform at the top of industrial speed benchmarks for applications such as embedding search. However, graph traversal applications often suffer from poor memory access patterns, and near neighbor search is no exception to this rule. Our measurements show that popular search indices such as the hierarchical navigable small-world graph (HNSW) can have poor cache miss performance. To address this problem, we apply graph reordering algorithms to near neighbor graphs. Graph reordering is a memory layout optimization that groups commonly-accessed nodes together in memory. We present exhaustive experiments applying several reordering algorithms to a leading graph-based near neighbor method based on the HNSW index. We find that reordering improves the query time by up to 40%, and we demonstrate that the time needed to reorder the graph is negligible compared to the time required to construct the index.
Estimating set similarity and detecting highly similar sets are fundamental problems in areas such as databases, machine learning, and information retrieval. MinHash is a well-known technique for approximating Jaccard similarity of sets and has been successfully used for many applications such as similarity search and large scale learning. Its two compress
A unit disk graph is the intersection graph of n congruent disks in the plane. Dominating sets in unit disk graphs are widely studied due to their application in wireless ad-hoc networks. Because the minimum dominating set problem for unit disk graphs is NP-hard, numerous approximation algorithms have been proposed in the literature, including some PTAS. However, since the proposal of a linear-time 5-approximation algorithm in 1995, the lack of efficient algorithms attaining better approximation factors has aroused attention. We introduce a linear-time O(n+m) approximation algorithm that takes the usual adjacency representation of the graph as input and outputs a 44/9-approximation. This approximation factor is also attained by a second algorithm, which takes the geometric representation of the graph as input and runs in O(n log n) time regardless of the number of edges. Additionally, we propose a 43/9-approximation which can be obtained in O(n^2 m) time given only the graphs adjacency representation. It is noteworthy that the dominating sets obtained by our algorithms are also independent sets.