Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Data with Categorical and Numerical Attributes Using Dual Hashing

Abstract

Locality-sensitive hashing techniques have been developed to efficiently handle nearest neighbor searches and similar pair identification problems for large volumes of high-dimensional data. This study proposes a locality-sensitive hashing method that can be applied to nearest neighbor search problems for data sets containing both numerical and categorical attributes. The proposed method makes use of dual hashing functions, where one function is dedicated to numerical attributes and the other to categorical attributes. The method consists of creating indexing structures for each of the dual hashing functions, gathering and combining the candidates sets, and thoroughly examining them to determine the nearest ones. The proposed method is examined for a few synthetic data sets, and results show that it improves performance in cases of large amounts of data with both numerical and categorical attributes.