LiLIS: A Lightweight Distributed Learned Index Framework for Spatial Decision Analysis

Abstract

Spatial query and analysis results are often directly applied to decision-making processes such as facility location, proximity resource discovery, accessibility analysis, and risk assessment. Therefore, the efficiency of underlying spatial data access directly impacts the response speed of spatial decision analysis. Existing distributed spatial analysis systems (e.g., Simba, Sedona) already have relatively mature execution frameworks. However, they incur substantial overhead in local index construction and query refinement, especially in read-intensive scenarios. Recent studies have shown that learned indices exhibit considerable retrieval potential in single-machine settings, yet how to integrate them into distributed spatial analysis systems with low modification costs remains unaddressed. In this article, we present LiLIS, a Lightweight distributed Learned Index prototype for Spatial decision analysis. Without modifying existing execution engines, LiLIS integrates machine-learned search strategies with spatial-aware partitioning in a distributed framework, and efficiently supports common spatial queries such as point queries, range queries, $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$NN) queries, and spatial joins. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that LiLIS achieves lower latency across various query types and reduces index construction overhead compared with baseline approaches. These results indicate its potential for improving the responsiveness of read-intensive spatial decision-support workflows.