We study the $k$ nearest neighbors problem in plane for general, convex, pairwise disjoint sites of constant description complexity such as line segments, disks, and quadrilaterals under a general family distance functions including $L_p$ norms additively weighted Euclidean distances. compose static data structure this setting with nearly optimal $O(n\log\log n)$ space, $O(\log n+k)$ query time...

BACKGROUND Major improvements are required in the coverage and quality of essential childhood interventions to achieve Millennium Development Goal Four (MDG 4). Long distance to health facilities is one of the known barriers to access. We investigated the effect of networked and Euclidean distances from home to formal health facilities on childhood mortality in rural Tanzania between 2005 and 2...

OBJECTIVE Switzerland has mountains and valleys complicating the access to a hospital and critical care in case of emergencies. Treatment success for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or stroke depends on timely treatment. We examined the relationship between distance to different hospital types and mortality from AMI or stroke in the Swiss National Cohort (SNC) Study. DESIGN AND SETTING The ...

The nearest neighbor classification is a simple and yet effective technique for pattern recognition. Performance of this technique depends significantly on the distance function used to compute similarity between examples. Some techniques were developed to learn weights of features for changing the distance structure of samples in nearest neighbor classification. In this paper, we propose an ap...