Fast Algorithms for Pareto Optimal Group-based Skyline

Abstract

Skyline, aiming at finding a Pareto optimal subset of points in a multi-dimensional dataset, has gained great interest due to its extensive use for multi-criteria analysis and decision making. Skyline consists of all points that are not dominated by, or not worse than other points. It is a candidate set of optimal solution, which depends on a specific evaluation criterion for optimum. However, conventional skyline queries, which return individual points, are inadequate in group querying case since optimal combinations are required. To address this gap, we study the skyline computation in group case and propose fast methods to find the group-based skyline (G-skyline), which contains Pareto optimal groups. For computing the front k skyline layers, we lay out an efficient approach that does the search concurrently on each dimension and investigates each point in subspace. After that, we present a novel structure to construct the G-skyline with a queue of combinations of the first-layer points. Experimental results show that our algorithms are several orders of magnitude faster than the previous work.