arXiv subjects

Edgar Chavez

Publications and source records attributed to Edgar Chavez.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

misi: a Metric Inverted Sample Index

We present misi, an inverted index for approximate nearest-neighbor search over general metric spaces whose vocabulary is a random sample of the database, of size proportional to $n$. Each object is represented by its $k_b$ nearest sample points, found by a pluggable inner index over the sample; queries are answered by an idf-weighted shared-neighbor vote followed by exact verification of $C$ candidates. The construction generalizes the NAPP index from a constant number of pivots to a linear-size vocabulary, which keeps posting lists at constant expected length $\rho = k_b/\alpha$ as $n$ grows and turns the index into a combinator: any high-recall index on $\alpha n$ points yields an index on $n$ points, for any metric. A probabilistic model gives a recall guarantee -- $k_b$ logarithmic in $n$ over the overlap gap suffices, with a verification budget the index itself estimates -- and a matching limit: the vote cannot resolve overlap differences below order $1/\sqrt{k_b}$. The design's strengths are structural: construction is $n$ independent searches -- embarrassingly parallel, deterministic, $5{,}250$ s for $10^8$ vectors on 64 cores, $3.7\times$ faster than a matched-recall graph build -- it streams under an enforced 3 GiB cap, and the portable artifact serves $10^8$ vectors from NVMe within an enforced 8 GB budget, below the working floor of the SSD-graph baseline. Its cost is query-time work: saturated graph baselines answer $6$-$16\times$ faster in RAM, and the verification budget for 0.99 recall grows as $n^{0.30}$. All results carry seeds, saturation sweeps and full configurations, are generated from run manifests, and include measured negative results. The intended applications weight construction cost, determinism, memory footprint, or black-box metrics over peak throughput: frequently rebuilt corpora, batch similarity workloads, constrained-memory serving.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Instance-based learning using the Half-Space Proximal Graph

The primary example of instance-based learning is the $k$-nearest neighbor rule (kNN), praised for its simplicity and the capacity to adapt to new unseen data and toss away old data. The main disadvantages often mentioned are the classification complexity, which is $O(n)$, and the estimation of the parameter $k$, the number of nearest neighbors to be used. The use of indexes at classification time lifts the former disadvantage, while there is no conclusive method for the latter. This paper presents a parameter-free instance-based learning algorithm using the {\em Half-Space Proximal} (HSP) graph. The HSP neighbors simultaneously possess proximity and variety concerning the center node. To classify a given query, we compute its HSP neighbors and apply a simple majority rule over them. In our experiments, the resulting classifier bettered $KNN$ for any $k$ in a battery of datasets. This improvement sticks even when applying weighted majority rules to both kNN and HSP classifiers. Surprisingly, when using a probabilistic index to approximate the HSP graph and consequently speeding-up the classification task, our method could {\em improve} its accuracy in stark contrast with the kNN classifier, which worsens with a probabilistic index.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Best Match Graphs

THIS IS A CORRECTED VERSION INCLUDING AN APPENDED CORRIGENDUM. Best match graphs arise naturally as the first processing intermediate in algorithms for orthology detection. Let $T$ be a phylogenetic (gene) tree $T$ and $\sigma$ an assignment of leaves of $T$ to species. The best match graph $(G,\sigma)$ is a digraph that contains an arc from $x$ to $y$ if the genes $x$ and $y$ reside in different species and $y$ is one of possibly many (evolutionary) closest relatives of $x$ compared to all other genes contained in the species $\sigma(y)$. Here, we characterize best match graphs and show that it can be decided in cubic time and quadratic space whether $(G,\sigma)$ derived from a tree in this manner. If the answer is affirmative, there is a unique least resolved tree that explains $(G,\sigma)$, which can also be constructed in cubic time.

math.CO↗

arXiv2017

A scalable solution to the nearest neighbor search problem through local-search methods on neighbor graphs

Near neighbor search (NNS) is a powerful abstraction for data access; however, data indexing is troublesome even for approximate indexes. For intrinsically high-dimensional data, high-quality fast searches demand either indexes with impractically large memory usage or preprocessing time. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to solve a nearest-neighbor query $q$ by minimizing a kernel function defined by the distance from $q$ to each object in the database. The minimization is performed using metaheuristics to solve the problem rapidly; even when some methods in the literature use this strategy behind the scenes, our approach is the first one using it explicitly. We also provide two approaches to select edges in the graph's construction stage that limit memory footprint and reduce the number of free parameters simultaneously. We carry out a thorough experimental comparison with state-of-the-art indexes through synthetic and real-world datasets; we found out that our contributions achieve competitive performances regarding speed, accuracy, and memory in almost any of our benchmarks.

cs.DS↗