Excerpt from Optimal Best-Match Retrieval

The 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.

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