Scalable Distributed Algorithm for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Problem in High Dimensional General Metric Spaces

We propose a novel approach for solving the approximate nearest neighbor search problem in arbitrary metric spaces. The distinctive feature of our approach is that we can incrementally build a non-hierarchical distributed structure for given metric space data with a logarithmic complexity scaling on the size of the structure and adjustable accuracy probabilistic nearest neighbor queries. The structure is based on a small world graph with vertices corresponding to the stored elements, edges for links between them and the greedy algorithm as base algorithm for searching. Both search and addition algorithms require only local information from the structure. The performed simulation for data in the Euclidian space shows that the structure built using the proposed algorithm has navigable small world properties with logarithmic search complexity at fixed accuracy and has weak (power law) scalability with the dimensionality of the stored data.