Nearest Neighbors Graph Construction: Peer Sampling to the Rescue

International audienceIn this paper, we propose an efficient KNN service, called KPS (KNN-Peer-Sampling). The KPS service can be used in various contexts e.g. recommendation systems, information retrieval and data mining. KPS borrows concepts from P2P gossip-based clustering protocols to provide a localized and efficient KNN computation in large-scale systems. KPS is a sampling-based iterative approach, combining ran-domness, to provide serendipity and avoid local minimum, and clustering , to ensure fast convergence. We compare KPS against the state of the art KNN centralized computation algorithm NNDescent, on multiple datasets. The experiments confirm the efficiency of KPS over NNDescent: KPS improves significantly on the computational cost while converging quickly to a close to optimal KNN graph. For instance, the cost, expressed in number of pairwise similarity computations, is reduced by ≈ 23% and ≈ 49% to construct high quality KNN graphs for Jester and MovieLens datasets, respectively. In addition, the randomized nature of KPS ensures eventual convergence, not always achieved with NNDescent