Diverse near neighbor problem

Sofiane Abbar, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Piotr Indyk, Sepideh Mahabadi, Kasturi R. Varadarajan

Abstract: Motivated by the recent research on diversity-aware search, we investigate the k-diverse near neighbor reporting problem. The problem is defined as follows: given a query point q, report the maximum diversity set S of k points in the ball of radius r around q. The diversity of a set S is measured by the minimum distance between any pair of points in $S$ (the higher, the better). We present two approximation algorithms for the case where the points live in a d-dimensional Hamming space. Our algorithms guarantee query times that are sub-linear in n and only polynomial in the diversity parameter k, as well as the dimension d. For low values of k, our algorithms achieve sub-linear query times even if the number of points within distance r from a query $q$ is linear in $n$. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first known algorithms of this type that offer provable guarantees.