On the Effects of Dimensionality Reduction on High Dimensional Similarity Search

Summary: Provides an intuitive model and diagnostic method explaining when and why dimensionality reduction helps or harms high‑dimensional similarity search, showing effects are highly data‑dependent. Argues information‑loss minimization maximizes precision/recall but not qualitative optimality, and small implementation tweaks to reduction methods can substantially improve similarity search quality. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1245
Venue: PODS
Year: 2001
Pagerank: 5.8148791e-05
Overall Rank: 6,646 | 54.41%
DOI: 10.1145/375551.383213

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Charu C. Aggarwal (IBM)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{aggarwal_pods01,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '01},
        title = {{On the Effects of Dimensionality Reduction on High Dimensional Similarity Search}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/375551.383213},
        doi = {10.1145/375551.383213},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Aggarwal, Charu C.},
        year = {2001}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,935	ATLAS: A Probabilistic Algorithm for High Dimensional Similarity Search	2011	SIGMOD	9.4560124e-05
12,472	Transforming Range Queries To Equivalent Box Queries To Optimize Page Access	2010	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0020210012
28	Nearest Neighbor Queries	1995	SIGMOD	0.00052102434
46	A Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study for Similarity-Search Methods in High-Dimensional Spaces	1998	VLDB	0.00044853085
85	The X-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Data	1996	VLDB	0.00035405879
483	FastMap: A Fast Algorithm for Indexing, Data-Mining and Visualization of Traditional and Multimedia Datasets	1995	SIGMOD	0.00017756569
797	Dimensionality Reduction for Similarity Searching in Dynamic Databases	1998	SIGMOD	0.00013927251
1,119	Latent Semantic Indexing: A Probabilistic Analysis	1998	PODS	0.00012097985
1,602	Local Dimensionality Reduction: A New Approach to Indexing High Dimensional Spaces	2000	VLDB	0.00010239526
1,833	Finding Generalized Projected Clusters in High Dimensional Spaces	2000	SIGMOD	9.6566846e-05
2,158	What is the nearest neighbor in high dimensional spaces?	2000	VLDB	9.0622995e-05
8,847	Applications of linear algebra in information retrieval and hypertext analysis	1999	PODS	5.3579487e-05

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2	2,158	What is the nearest neighbor in high dimensional spaces?	2000	VLDB
3	3,310	Similarity Query Processing for High-Dimensional Data	2020	VLDB
4	3,353	Efficient EMD-based Similarity Search in Multimedia Databases via Flexible Dimensionality Reduction	2008	SIGMOD
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