Definition
Given a set P of n points in a d-dimensional space \(\mathfrak{R}^{d}\) and a query point \(q \in \mathfrak{R}^{d}\), a nearest neighbor (NN) query is to find the set of nearest points to the query point q. Formally, \(NN\left (q\right ) = \left \{p\vert p \in P,\forall o \in P,(o\neq p),\vert qp\vert < \left \vert qo\right \vert \right \}\). In most cases, \(\mathfrak{R}^{d}\) refers to a d-dimensional Euclidean space.
Main Text
Nearest neighbor search is one of the oldest problems in computer science. The NN algorithm was one of the earliest algorithms used to determine a solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP). The NN query first appeared in Geographic Information Systems around 1990 and has now already become a frequently encountered query type in this field. Recently, several NNalgorithms have been proposed for NN queries based on spatial access methods (e.g., quad-trees, R-trees). For all these algorithms, depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS...
Recommended Reading
Roussopoulos N, Kelley S, Vincent F (1995) Nearest neighbor queries. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD international conference on management of data, San Jose, pp 71–79
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this entry
Cite this entry
Chen, F., Lu, CT. (2016). Nearest Neighbor Query, Definition. In: Shekhar, S., **ong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_866-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23519-6_866-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23519-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering