Nearest Neighbor Queries

Nick Roussopoulos , Stephen Kelley and Frederick Vincent

Computer Science Department
University of Maryland
College Park

The complete paper is available in:

The slide presentation of Sigmod 95 is available in:

Abstract

A frequently encountered type of query in Geographic Information Systems is to find the k nearest neighbor objects to a given point in space. Processing such queries requires substantially different search algorithms than those for location or range queries. In this paper we present an efficient branch-and-bound R-tree traversal algorithm to find the nearest neighbor object to a point, and then generalize it to finding the k nearest neighbors. We also discuss metrics for an optimistic and a pessimistic search ordering strategy as well as for pruning. Finally, we present the results of several experiments obtained using the implementation of our algorithm and examine the behavior of the metrics and the scalability of the algorithm.


Last updated November 7, 1995