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Concept
Nearest neighbor search
Summary
Nearest neighbor search (NNS), as a form of proximity search, is the optimization problem of finding the point in a given set that is closest (or most similar) to a given point. Closeness is typically expressed in terms of a dissimilarity function: the less similar the objects, the larger the function values.
Formally, the nearest-neighbor (NN) search problem is defined as follows: given a set S of points in a space M and a query point q ∈ M, find the closest point in S to q. Donald Knuth in vol. 3 of The Art of Computer Programming (1973) called it the post-office problem, referring to an application of assigning to a residence the nearest post office. A direct generalization of this problem is a k-NN search, where we need to find the k closest points.
Most commonly M is a metric space and dissimilarity is expressed as a distance metric, which is symmetric and satisfies the triangle inequality. Even more common, M is taken to be the d-dimensional vector space where dissimilarity is measured using the Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance or other distance metric. However, the dissimilarity function can be arbitrary. One example is asymmetric Bregman divergence, for which the triangle inequality does not hold.
The nearest neighbour search problem arises in numerous fields of application, including:
Pattern recognition – in particular for optical character recognition
Statistical classification – see k-nearest neighbor algorithm
Computer vision – for point cloud registration
Computational geometry – see Closest pair of points problem
Cryptanalysis – for lattice problem
Databases – e.g.
Coding theory – see maximum likelihood decoding
Semantic Search
Data compression – see MPEG-2 standard
Robotic sensing
Recommendation systems, e.g. see Collaborative filtering
Internet marketing – see contextual advertising and behavioral targeting
DNA sequencing
Spell checking – suggesting correct spelling
Plagiarism detection
Similarity scores for predicting career paths of professional athletes.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood