Excerpt from Optimal Best-Match RetrievalThe best-match problem (also known as the post office problem or the nearest neighbor problem arises in many applications, such as database management information retrieval [4, 7, molecular biology [15, pattern classification [11, 14, 18] and computational geometry The problem is to find, among a file of objects, the ones which are most similar or closest to a given target according to some similarity distance measure. To answer this type of queries, one could compute the distance between each object of the file and the target, and then search for the objects with minimum distance. The major problem with this approach is its computational expense, particularly when there are many targets to be identified and the file is large. To reduce computational effort, many techniques have been presented in the literature.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.