The Pruning Power: Theory and Heuristics for Mining Databases with Multiple k-Nearest-Neighbor Queries

Numerous data mining algorithms rely heavily on similarity queries. Although many or even all of the performed queries do not depend on each other, the algorithms process them in a sequential way. Recently, a novel technique for efficiently processing multiple similarity queries issued simultaneously has been introduced. It was shown that multiple similarity queries substantially speed-up query intensive data mining applications. For the important case of multiple k-nearest neighbor queries on top of a multidimensional index structure the problem of scheduling directory pages and data pages arises. This aspect has not been addressed so far. In this paper, we derive the theoretic foundation of this scheduling problem. Additionally, we propose several scheduling algorithms based on our theoretical results. In our experimental evaluation, we show that considering the maximum priority of pages clearly outperforms other scheduling approaches.