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M-tree: An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces

Summary: Introduces the balanced M-tree, a disk-based index for generic metric spaces using only distance functions satisfying the metric axioms. Supports range and k-NN search, with experiments showing scalability and practical performance beyond vector-space indexing. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID
8634
Venue
VLDB
Year
1997
Pagerank
0.00040719947
Overall Rank
56 | 99.62%
DOI
-

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{ciaccia_vldb97,
        title = {{M-tree: An Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces}},
        author = {Ciaccia, Paolo and Patella, Marco and Zezula, Pavel},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '97},
        pages = {426--435},
        year = {1997}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 98 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
46 A Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study for Similarity-Search Methods in High-Dimensional Spaces 1998 VLDB 0.00044853085
158 Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning 2003 SIGMOD 0.00028199923
291 OPTICS: Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure 1999 SIGMOD 0.00022264197
303 On The Marriage of Lp-norms and Edit Distance 2004 VLDB 0.00021956234
665 Voronoi-Based K Nearest Neighbor Search for Spatial Network Databases 2004 VLDB 0.00015167291
705 HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2018 VLDB 0.00014829964
796 Optimal Multi-Step k-Nearest Neighbor Search 1998 SIGMOD 0.00013932561
1,357 RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 0.00011043994
1,418 LISA: A Learned Index Structure for Spatial Data 2020 SIGMOD 0.00010835539
1,557 Distance-based Outlier Detection in Data Streams 2016 VLDB 0.00010367451
1,735 High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: with Reliable and Efficient Distance Comparison Operations 2023 SIGMOD 9.9004924e-05
1,907 Incremental Clustering for Mining in a Data Warehousing Environment 1998 VLDB 9.501636e-05
1,934 Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2023 VLDB 9.4561907e-05
2,046 Distributed Trajectory Similarity Search 2017 VLDB 9.260657e-05
2,101 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS 9.1657486e-05
2,186 String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation 2014 VLDB 9.0001436e-05
2,525 Answering Top-k Queries Using Views 2006 VLDB 8.4653166e-05
2,532 STRG-Index: Spatio-Temporal Region Graph Indexing for Large Video Databases 2005 SIGMOD 8.4572502e-05
2,534 ELPIS: Graph-Based Similarity Search for Scalable Data Science 2023 VLDB 8.4561875e-05
2,572 DeltaPQ: Lossless Product Quantization Code Compression for High Dimensional Similarity Search 2020 VLDB 8.4027322e-05
2,659 Identifying Similarities, Periodicities and Bursts for Online Search Queries 2004 SIGMOD 8.286986e-05
2,699 Approximate XML Joins 2002 SIGMOD 8.2433011e-05
2,734 Return of the Lernaean Hydra: Experimental Evaluation of Data Series Approximate Similarity Search 2020 VLDB 8.190416e-05
2,756 NETS: Extremely Fast Outlier Detection from a Data Stream via Set-Based Processing 2019 VLDB 8.1604054e-05
2,979 Indexing the Distance: An Efficient Method to KNN Processing 2001 VLDB 7.8984588e-05
3,037 The Lernaean Hydra of Data Series Similarity Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State of the Art 2019 VLDB 7.8275859e-05
3,108 Practical and Asymptotically Optimal Quantization of High-Dimensional Vectors in Euclidean Space for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.7499741e-05
3,135 Real-Time Distance-Based Outlier Detection in Data Streams 2021 VLDB 7.7214053e-05
3,193 Efficient Exact Edit Similarity Query Processing with the Asymmetric Signature Scheme 2011 SIGMOD 7.649474e-05
3,286 iRangeGraph: Improvising Range-dedicated Graphs for Range-filtering Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 7.5596483e-05
3,310 Similarity Query Processing for High-Dimensional Data 2020 VLDB 7.5363562e-05
3,710 Efficient Reverse k-Nearest Neighbor Search in Arbitrary Metric Spaces 2006 SIGMOD 7.1780127e-05
3,766 TASTI: Semantic Indexes for Machine Learning-based Queries over Unstructured Data 2022 SIGMOD 7.1430942e-05
3,799 SymphonyQG: Towards Symphonious Integration of Quantization and Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.114484e-05
3,835 FALCON: Feedback Adaptive Loop for Content-Based Retrieval 2000 VLDB 7.0835179e-05
3,958 Continuous Outlier Detection in Data Streams: An Extensible Framework and State-Of-The-Art Algorithms 2013 SIGMOD 6.9909714e-05
3,984 Learning User Preferences By Adaptive Pairwise Comparison 2015 VLDB 6.9739437e-05
4,060 Inter-Media Hashing for Large-scale Retrieval from Heterogeneous Data Sources 2013 SIGMOD 6.9322681e-05
4,627 Pivot-based Metric Indexing 2017 VLDB 6.5963674e-05
5,042 FeedbackBypass: A New Approach to Interactive Similarity Query Processing 2001 VLDB 6.3896532e-05
5,112 Fast Large-Scale Trajectory Clustering 2020 VLDB 6.3596697e-05
5,162 Online Event-driven Subsequence Matching over Financial Data Streams 2004 SIGMOD 6.339805e-05
5,231 Hercules Against Data Series Similarity Search 2022 VLDB 6.3068064e-05
5,244 Top-k Nearest Neighbor Search In Uncertain Data Series 2015 VLDB 6.3018164e-05
5,304 An Evaluation of Generic Bulk Loading Techniques 2001 VLDB 6.2733516e-05
5,726 Pigeonring: A Principle for Faster Thresholded Similarity Search 2019 VLDB 6.1079184e-05
5,800 DET-LSH: A Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme with Dynamic Encoding Tree for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.0850924e-05
6,093 High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search: From Time Series to Deep Network Embeddings 2020 SIGMOD 5.978635e-05
6,133 Efficient Data-aware Distance Comparison Operations for High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 5.9654376e-05
6,496 Reference-Based Indexing of Sequence Databases 2006 VLDB 5.8632988e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 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
4 The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles 1990 SIGMOD 0.001157935
28 Nearest Neighbor Queries 1995 SIGMOD 0.00052102434
41 Fast Subsequence Matching in Time-Series Databases 1994 SIGMOD 0.00046675394
85 The X-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Data 1996 VLDB 0.00035405879
202 Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems (Extended Abstract) 1995 VLDB 0.00025454884
483 FastMap: A Fast Algorithm for Indexing, Data-Mining and Visualization of Traditional and Multimedia Datasets 1995 SIGMOD 0.00017756569
592 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD 0.00016029789
784 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB 0.00014069958
1,384 Content-Based Image Indexing 1994 VLDB 0.00010957733
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 6,947 Indexing for Subtree Similarity-Search using Edit Distance 2013 SIGMOD
2 2,421 Multidimensional Access Methods: Trees Have Grown Everywhere 1997 VLDB
3 8,391 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB
4 1,778 The A-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Spaces Using Relative Approximation 2000 VLDB
5 10,469 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD
6 3,047 Similarity Evaluation on Tree-structured Data 2005 SIGMOD
7 9,334 Adaptive Indexing in High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 2023 VLDB
8 784 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB
9 592 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD
10 2,101 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS