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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
h55aa6aa8458741b6
Venue
VLDB
Year
1997
Pagerank
0.00040363819
Overall Rank
56 | 99.63%
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 99 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
45 A Quantitative Analysis and Performance Study for Similarity-Search Methods in High-Dimensional Spaces 1998 VLDB 0.00045027197
161 Robust and Efficient Fuzzy Match for Online Data Cleaning 2003 SIGMOD 0.00027705594
300 OPTICS: Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure 1999 SIGMOD 0.00021800242
306 On The Marriage of Lp-norms and Edit Distance 2004 VLDB 0.00021565993
648 HD-Index: Pushing the Scalability-Accuracy Boundary for Approximate kNN Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2018 VLDB 0.00015156941
678 Voronoi-Based K Nearest Neighbor Search for Spatial Network Databases 2004 VLDB 0.00014836541
803 RaBitQ: Quantizing High-Dimensional Vectors with a Theoretical Error Bound for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 0.00013838349
826 Optimal Multi-Step k-Nearest Neighbor Search 1998 SIGMOD 0.000136317
1,440 LISA: A Learned Index Structure for Spatial Data 2020 SIGMOD 0.00010638444
1,480 Distance-based Outlier Detection in Data Streams 2016 VLDB 0.00010536005
1,600 High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: with Reliable and Efficient Distance Comparison Operations 2023 SIGMOD 0.00010111099
1,618 Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2023 VLDB 0.00010053127
1,946 Incremental Clustering for Mining in a Data Warehousing Environment 1998 VLDB 9.3216771e-05
2,023 Distributed Trajectory Similarity Search 2017 VLDB 9.167612e-05
2,077 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS 9.0758123e-05
2,223 String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation 2014 VLDB 8.8105347e-05
2,264 ELPIS: Graph-Based Similarity Search for Scalable Data Science 2023 VLDB 8.7286407e-05
2,444 DeltaPQ: Lossless Product Quantization Code Compression for High Dimensional Similarity Search 2020 VLDB 8.4556406e-05
2,534 STRG-Index: Spatio-Temporal Region Graph Indexing for Large Video Databases 2005 SIGMOD 8.3296392e-05
2,547 NETS: Extremely Fast Outlier Detection from a Data Stream via Set-Based Processing 2019 VLDB 8.3120835e-05
2,561 Answering Top-k Queries Using Views 2006 VLDB 8.2940439e-05
2,684 Identifying Similarities, Periodicities and Bursts for Online Search Queries 2004 SIGMOD 8.1355077e-05
2,717 iRangeGraph: Improvising Range-dedicated Graphs for Range-filtering Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 SIGMOD 8.0953706e-05
2,730 Return of the Lernaean Hydra: Experimental Evaluation of Data Series Approximate Similarity Search 2020 VLDB 8.0842027e-05
2,747 Approximate XML Joins 2002 SIGMOD 8.0576613e-05
2,821 Practical and Asymptotically Optimal Quantization of High-Dimensional Vectors in Euclidean Space for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.9674226e-05
2,870 The Lernaean Hydra of Data Series Similarity Search: An Experimental Evaluation of the State of the Art 2019 VLDB 7.919641e-05
2,907 Real-Time Distance-Based Outlier Detection in Data Streams 2021 VLDB 7.8732279e-05
3,017 Indexing the Distance: An Efficient Method to KNN Processing 2001 VLDB 7.7455245e-05
3,232 Similarity Query Processing for High-Dimensional Data 2020 VLDB 7.5029541e-05
3,256 Efficient Exact Edit Similarity Query Processing with the Asymmetric Signature Scheme 2011 SIGMOD 7.4855571e-05
3,378 SymphonyQG: Towards Symphonious Integration of Quantization and Graph for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 SIGMOD 7.3542798e-05
3,640 TASTI: Semantic Indexes for Machine Learning-based Queries over Unstructured Data 2022 SIGMOD 7.1410511e-05
3,776 Efficient Reverse k-Nearest Neighbor Search in Arbitrary Metric Spaces 2006 SIGMOD 7.0244572e-05
3,910 FALCON: Feedback Adaptive Loop for Content-Based Retrieval 2000 VLDB 6.9284024e-05
3,949 Continuous Outlier Detection in Data Streams: An Extensible Framework and State-Of-The-Art Algorithms 2013 SIGMOD 6.9051268e-05
4,083 Learning User Preferences By Adaptive Pairwise Comparison 2015 VLDB 6.8143727e-05
4,151 Inter-Media Hashing for Large-scale Retrieval from Heterogeneous Data Sources 2013 SIGMOD 6.7735189e-05
4,367 An Evaluation of Generic Bulk Loading Techniques 2001 VLDB 6.6312601e-05
4,642 Pivot-based Metric Indexing 2017 VLDB 6.4874232e-05
5,014 Fast Large-Scale Trajectory Clustering 2020 VLDB 6.3118364e-05
5,167 FeedbackBypass: A New Approach to Interactive Similarity Query Processing 2001 VLDB 6.2434494e-05
5,260 Top-k Nearest Neighbor Search In Uncertain Data Series 2015 VLDB 6.2041665e-05
5,273 Online Event-driven Subsequence Matching over Financial Data Streams 2004 SIGMOD 6.1986796e-05
5,318 Hercules Against Data Series Similarity Search 2022 VLDB 6.1818367e-05
5,415 GTS: GPU-based Tree Index for Fast Similarity Search 2024 SIGMOD 6.1378972e-05
5,449 Pigeonring: A Principle for Faster Thresholded Similarity Search 2019 VLDB 6.123954e-05
5,530 DET-LSH: A Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme with Dynamic Encoding Tree for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2024 VLDB 6.0907372e-05
6,184 High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search: From Time Series to Deep Network Embeddings 2020 SIGMOD 5.8567387e-05
6,244 Efficient Data-aware Distance Comparison Operations for High-Dimensional Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search 2025 VLDB 5.8355024e-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 0.0019923528
4 The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles 1990 SIGMOD 0.0011402175
28 Nearest Neighbor Queries 1995 SIGMOD 0.00051292389
42 Fast Subsequence Matching in Time-Series Databases 1994 SIGMOD 0.00045755116
90 The X-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Data 1996 VLDB 0.00034847854
207 Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems (Extended Abstract) 1995 VLDB 0.00024976482
488 FastMap: A Fast Algorithm for Indexing, Data-Mining and Visualization of Traditional and Multimedia Datasets 1995 SIGMOD 0.00017451091
597 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD 0.00015759877
802 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB 0.00013841951
1,406 Content-Based Image Indexing 1994 VLDB 0.00010745013
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 7,088 Indexing for Subtree Similarity-Search using Edit Distance 2013 SIGMOD
2 2,403 Multidimensional Access Methods: Trees Have Grown Everywhere 1997 VLDB
3 8,573 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB
4 10,667 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD
5 1,793 The A-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Spaces Using Relative Approximation 2000 VLDB
6 3,110 Similarity Evaluation on Tree-structured Data 2005 SIGMOD
7 9,409 Adaptive Indexing in High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 2023 VLDB
8 802 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB
9 597 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD
10 2,077 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS