High-Dimensional Similarity Query Processing for Data Science

Abstract

Similarity query (a.k.a. nearest neighbor query) processing has been an active research topic for several decades. It is an essential procedure in a wide range of applications (e.g., classification & regression, deduplication, image retrieval, and recommender systems). Recently, representation learning and auto-encoding methods as well as pre-trained models have gained popularity. They basically deal with dense high-dimensional data, and this trend brings new opportunities and challenges to similarity query processing. Meanwhile, new techniques have emerged to tackle this long-standing problem theoretically and empirically. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive review of high-dimensional similarity query processing for data science. It introduces solutions from a variety of research communities, including data mining (DM), database (DB), machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and theoretical computer science (TCS), thereby highlighting the interplay between modern computer science and artificial intelligence technologies. We first discuss the importance of high-dimensional similarity query processing in data science applications, and then review query processing algorithms such as cover tree, locality sensitive hashing, product quantization, proximity graphs, as well as recent advancements such as learned indexes. We analyze their strengths and weaknesses and discuss the selection of algorithms in various application scenarios. Moreover, we consider the selectivity estimation of high-dimensional similarity queries, and show how researchers are bringing in state-of-the-art ML techniques to address this problem. We expect that this tutorial will provide an impetus towards new technologies for data science.