Papers › On the Merge of k-NN Graph

On the Merge of k-NN Graph

2 Aug 2019arXiv:1908.00814archive 2025-07-28

Wan-Lei Zhao, Hui Wang, Peng-Cheng Lin, Chong-Wah Ngo

k-nearest neighbor graph is a fundamental data structure in many disciplines such as information retrieval, data-mining, pattern recognition, and machine learning, etc. In the literature, considerable research has been focusing on how to efficiently build an approximate k-nearest neighbor graph (k-NN graph) for a fixed dataset. Unfortunately, a closely related issue of how to merge two existing k-NN graphs has been overlooked. In this paper, we address the issue of k-NN graph merging in two different scenarios. In the first scenario, a symmetric merge algorithm is proposed to combine two approximate k-NN graphs. The algorithm facilitates large-scale processing by the efficient merging of k-NN graphs that are produced in parallel. In the second scenario, a joint merge algorithm is proposed to expand an existing k-NN graph with a raw dataset. The algorithm enables the incremental construction of a hierarchical approximate k-NN graph. Superior performance is attained when leveraging the hierarchy for NN search of various data types, dimensionality, and distance measures.

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Information RetrievalRetrievalgraph construction

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k-NN

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