Smooth Tradeoffs between Insert and Query Complexity in Nearest Neighbor Search

Abstract

Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) has emerged as the method of choice for high dimensional similarity search, a classical problem of interest in numerous applications. LSH-based solutions require that each data point be inserted into a number A of hash tables, after which a query can be answered by performing B lookups. The original LSH solution of [IM98] showed for the first time that both A and B can be made sublinear in the number of data points. Unfortunately, the classical LSH solution does not provide any tradeoff between insert and query complexity, whereas for data (respectively, query) intensive applications one would like to minimize insert time by choosing a smaller $A$ (respectively, minimize query time by choosing a smaller B). A partial remedy for this is provided by Entropy LSH [Pan06], which allows to make either inserts or queries essentially constant time at the expense of a loss in the other parameter, but no algorithm that achieves a smooth tradeoff is known.In this paper, we present an algorithm for performing similarity search under the Euclidean metric that resolves the problem above. Our solution is inspired by Entropy LSH, but uses a very different analysis to achieve a smooth tradeoff between insert and query complexity. Our results improve upon or match, up to lower order terms in the exponent, best known data-oblivious algorithms for the Euclidean metric.