M-tree

In computer science, M-trees are tree data structures that are similar to R-trees and B-trees. It is constructed using a metric and relies on the triangle inequality for efficient range and k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) queries. While M-trees can perform well in many conditions, the tree can also have large overlap and there is no clear strategy on how to best avoid overlap. In addition, it can only be used for distance functions that satisfy the triangle inequality, while many advanced dissimilarity functions used in information retrieval do not satisfy this.^[1]

^ Ciaccia, Paolo; Patella, Marco; Zezula, Pavel (1997). "M-tree An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces" (PDF). Proceedings of the 23rd VLDB Conference Athens, Greece, 1997. IBM Almaden Research Center: Very Large Databases Endowment Inc. pp. 426–435. p426. Retrieved 2010-09-07.

[p426-1] Ciaccia, Paolo; Patella, Marco; Zezula, Pavel (1997). "M-tree An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces" (PDF). Proceedings of the 23rd VLDB Conference Athens, Greece, 1997. IBM Almaden Research Center: Very Large Databases Endowment Inc. pp. 426–435. p426. Retrieved 2010-09-07.

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