Aggregate k Nearest Neighbor Queries in Metric Spaces

Aggregate k nearest neighbor (AkNN) queries are useful in many areas, such as multimedia retrieval and resource allocation, to name but a few. Most of existing works on AkNN query only focus on Euclidean space or specific metric space, which employ properties of particular data to accelerate the query. However, due to the complex data types involved and the needs for flexible similarity criteria seen in real applications, properties of particular data cannot be used for general case. Hence, in this paper, we investigate AkNN search in metric spaces, termed as metric AkNN (MAkNN) search, as metric spaces can support any type of data and flexible similarity criteria as long as satisfying triangle inequality. To efficiently answer MAkNN queries, we develop several pruning techniques and corresponding algorithms based on SPB-tree. Extensive experiments using three real data sets verify the efficiency of our MAkNN algorithms.