k-NN Graph Construction: a Generic Online Approach

Nearest neighbor search and k-nearest neighbor graph construction are two fundamental issues arise from many disciplines such as information retrieval, data-mining, machine learning and computer vision. Despite continuous efforts have been taken in the last several decades, these two issues remain challenging. They become more and more imminent given the big data emerges in various fields and has been expanded significantly over the years. In this paper, a simple but effective solution both for k-nearest neighbor search and k-nearest neighbor graph construction is presented. Namely, these two issues are addressed jointly. On one hand, the k-nearest neighbor graph construction is treated as a nearest neighbor search task. Each data sample along with its k-nearest neighbors are joined into the k-nearest neighbor graph by sequentially performing the nearest neighbor search on the graph under construction. On the other hand, the built knearest neighbor graph is used to support k-nearest neighbor search. Since the graph is built online, dynamic updating of the graph, which is not desirable from most of the existing solutions, is supported. Moreover, this solution is feasible for various distance measures. Its effectiveness both as a k-nearest neighbor construction and k-nearest neighbor search approach is verified across various datasets in different scales, various dimensions and under different metrics.