Answering why-not questions on KNN queries

Abstract

Being decades of study, the usability of database systems have received more attention in recent years. Now it is especially able to explain missing objects in a query result, which is called “why-not” questions, and is the focus of concern. This paper studies the problem of answering why-not questions on KNN queries. In our real life, many users would like to use KNN queries to investigate the surrounding circumstances. Nevertheless, they often feel disappointed when finding the result not including their expected objects. In this paper, we use the query refinement approach to resolve the problem. Given the original KNN query and a set of missing objects as input, our algorithm offer a refined KNN query that includes the missing objects to the user. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed optimizations and algorithms.