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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
0.00040370171
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 49 of 99 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
6,619 Reference-Based Indexing of Sequence Databases 2006 VLDB 5.7319339e-05
6,868 Flexible Aggregate Similarity Search 2011 SIGMOD 5.6599382e-05
6,919 GTI: Graph-based Tree Index with Logarithm Updates for Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces 2025 VLDB 5.644237e-05
7,006 A Generic Framework for Efficient and Effective Subsequence Retrieval 2012 VLDB 5.6234186e-05
7,009 Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics 2022 SIGMOD 5.6222568e-05
7,305 RWalks: Random Walks as Attribute Diffusers for Filtered Vector Search 2025 SIGMOD 5.5586007e-05
7,327 Anytime Measures for Top-k Algorithms 2007 VLDB 5.5512161e-05
7,395 LiteHST: A Tree Embedding based Method for Similarity Search 2023 SIGMOD 5.5370691e-05
7,502 On the Efficiency of K-Means Clustering: Evaluation, Optimization, and Algorithm Selection 2021 VLDB 5.5076707e-05
7,560 Cache-oblivious High-performance Similarity Join 2019 SIGMOD 5.4962229e-05
7,998 Set Similarity Join on Probabilistic Data 2010 VLDB 5.4104124e-05
8,158 ScalaGiST: Scalable Generalized Search Trees for MapReduce Systems [Innovative Systems Paper] 2014 VLDB 5.3875848e-05
8,245 Indexing Mixed Types for Approximate Retrieval 2005 VLDB 5.3694945e-05
8,306 Wolverine: Highly Efficient Monotonic Search Path Repair for Graph-based ANN Index Updates 2025 VLDB 5.3583322e-05
8,369 Waffle: A Workload-Aware and Query-Sensitive Framework for Disk-Based Spatial Indexing 2023 VLDB 5.3450708e-05
8,566 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB 5.3137327e-05
8,786 A Generalized Approach for Reducing Expensive Distance Calls for A Broad Class of Proximity Problems 2021 SIGMOD 5.2768554e-05
8,849 VStream: A Distributed Streaming Vector Search System 2025 VLDB 5.2646236e-05
8,896 FINEX: A Fast Index for Exact & Flexible Density-Based Clustering 2023 SIGMOD 5.2559789e-05
8,927 Contorting High Dimensional Data for Efficient Main Memory KNN Processing 2003 SIGMOD 5.2559789e-05
9,149 Towards Systematic Index Dynamization 2024 VLDB 5.2186338e-05
9,329 Dimensional Testing for Reverse k-Nearest Neighbor Search 2017 VLDB 5.1923126e-05
9,400 Adaptive Indexing in High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 2023 VLDB 5.1845732e-05
9,435 Hypersphere Dominance: An Optimal Approach 2014 SIGMOD 5.1780501e-05
9,436 Using Sets of Feature Vectors for Similarity Search on Voxelized CAD Objects 2003 SIGMOD 5.1780501e-05
9,905 DiskJoin: Large-scale Vector Similarity Join with SSD 2026 SIGMOD 5.1103839e-05
10,324 TRIM: Accelerating High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search with Enhanced Triangle-Inequality-Based Pruning 2026 SIGMOD 5.0346745e-05
10,405 Adaptive Outlier Detection over Data Stream 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,540 Accelerating High-Dimensional ANN Search via Skipping Redundant Distance Computations 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,656 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
10,874 BBC: Improving Large-k Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with a Bucket-based Result Collector 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,075 MS-Index: Fast Top-k Subsequence Search for Multivariate Time Series under Euclidean Distance 2026 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,652 LARGE: A Length-Aggregation-based Grid Structure for Line Density Visualization 2024 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
11,882 DESIRE: An Efficient Dynamic Cluster-based Forest Indexing for Similarity Search in Multi-Metric Spaces 2022 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,223 EPUI: Experimental Platform for Urban Informatics 2018 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
12,228 ZigZag: Supporting Similarity Queries on Vector Space Models 2018 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
12,239 MSQL+: A Plugin Toolkit for Similarity Search under Metric Spaces in Distributed Relational Database Systems 2018 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,396 Indexing Metric Uncertain Data for Range Queries 2015 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
12,495 YZStack: Provisioning Customizable Solution for Big Data 2014 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,579 QuEval: Beyond high-dimensional indexing à la carte 2013 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,659 Exact Indexing for Support Vector Machines 2011 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
12,662 Effective Data Co-Reduction for Multimedia Similarity Search 2011 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
12,754 Efficient RkNN Retrieval with Arbitrary Non-Metric Similarity Measures 2010 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,763 Transforming Range Queries To Equivalent Box Queries To Optimize Page Access 2010 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,964 MIST: Distributed Indexing and Querying in Sensor Networks using Statistical Models 2007 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
12,994 Using High Dimensional Indexes to Support Relevance Feedback Based Interactive Images Retrieval 2006 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
13,068 Indexing and Mining Streams 2004 SIGMOD 4.9793485e-05
13,108 The ND-Tree: A Dynamic Indexing Technique for Multidimensional Non-ordered Discrete Data Spaces 2003 VLDB 4.9793485e-05
13,153 Fast Evaluation Techniques for Complex Similarity Queries 2001 VLDB 4.9793485e-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 0.001992968
4 The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles 1990 SIGMOD 0.0011405675
28 Nearest Neighbor Queries 1995 SIGMOD 0.00051312804
42 Fast Subsequence Matching in Time-Series Databases 1994 SIGMOD 0.00045773967
90 The X-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Data 1996 VLDB 0.00034860244
206 Generalized Search Trees for Database Systems (Extended Abstract) 1995 VLDB 0.00024986675
488 FastMap: A Fast Algorithm for Indexing, Data-Mining and Visualization of Traditional and Multimedia Datasets 1995 SIGMOD 0.00017457851
597 Distance-Based Indexing For High-Dimensional Metric Spaces 1997 SIGMOD 0.00015766567
802 Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces 1995 VLDB 0.00013847746
1,407 Content-Based Image Indexing 1994 VLDB 0.00010749393
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Semantically Similar Papers

# Overall Rank Paper Year Venue
1 7,086 Indexing for Subtree Similarity-Search using Edit Distance 2013 SIGMOD
2 2,405 Multidimensional Access Methods: Trees Have Grown Everywhere 1997 VLDB
3 8,566 Similarity Search for Adaptive Ellipsoid Queries Using Spatial Transformation 2001 VLDB
4 1,793 The A-tree: An Index Structure for High-Dimensional Spaces Using Relative Approximation 2000 VLDB
5 10,656 LM-Tree: A Hybrid Learned Index for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces 2026 SIGMOD
6 3,108 Similarity Evaluation on Tree-structured Data 2005 SIGMOD
7 9,400 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 2,079 A Cost Model for Similarity Queries in Metric Spaces 1998 PODS