Slicing the Dimensionality: Top-k Query Processing for High-Dimensional Spaces

Top-k (preference) queries are used in several domains to retrieve the set of k tuples that more closely match a given query. For high-dimensional spaces, evaluation of top-k queries is expensive, as data and space partitioning indices perform worse than sequential scan. An alternative approach is the use of sorted lists to speed up query evaluation. This approach extends performance gains when compared to sequential scan to about ten dimensions. However, data-sets for which preference queries are considered, often are high-dimensional. In this paper, we explore the use of bit-sliced indices (BSI) to encode the attributes or score lists and perform top-k queries over high-dimensional data using bit-wise operations. Our approach does not require sorting or random access to the index. Additionally, bit-sliced indices require less space than other type of indices. The size of the bit-sliced index (without using compression) for a normalized data-set with 3 decimals is 60 times smaller than the size of sorted lists. Furthermore, our experimental evaluation shows that the use of BSI for top-k query processing is more efficient than Sequential Scan for high-dimensional data. When compared to Sequential Top-k Algorithm (STA), BSI is one order of magnitude faster.