Randomized Algorithms for Comparison-based Search

This paper addresses the problem of finding the nearest neighbor (or one of the R -nearest neighbors) of a query object q in a database of n objects, when we can only use a comparison oracle. The comparison oracle, given two reference objects and a query object, returns the reference object most similar to the query object. The main problem we study is how to search the database for the nearest neighbor (NN) of a query, while minimizing the questions. The difficulty of this problem depends on properties of the underlying database. We show the importance of a characterization: \emph{combinatorial disorder} D which defines approximate triangle inequalities on ranks.