Approximate Nearest Neighbors in Limited Space

Abstract: We consider the $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate nearest neighbor search problem: given a set $X$ of $n$ points in a $d$-dimensional space, build a data structure that, given any query point $y$, finds a point $x \in X$ whose distance to $y$ is at most $(1+\epsilon) \min_{x \in X} |x-y|$ for an accuracy parameter $\epsilon \in (0,1)$. Our main result is a data structure that occupies only $$O(\epsilon^{-2} n \log(n) \log(1/\epsilon))$$ bits of space, assuming all point coordinates are integers in the range ${-n^{O(1)} \ldots n<sup>{O(1)}}$, i.e., the coordinates have $O(\log n)$ bits of precision. This improves over the best previously known space bound of $O(\epsilon^{-2} n \log(n)<sup>2)$, obtained via the randomized dimensionality reduction method of Johnson and Lindenstrauss (1984). We also consider the more general problem of estimating all distances from a collection of query points to all data points $X$, and provide almost tight upper and lower bounds for the space complexity of this problem.