Nearest-Neighbor Searching Under Uncertainty

Summary: Handles nearest-neighbor queries under probabilistic location uncertainty (points/queries as PDFs), defining the expected nearest neighbor (ENN) objective. Gives first nontrivial exact and ε-approx ENN algorithms with near-linear indexes, polylog/sublinear queries and provable guarantees. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hcbf49b55c17c6a7d
Venue: PODS
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 6.3849385e-05
Overall Rank: 4,828 | 67.64%
DOI: 10.1145/2213556.2213588

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Pankaj K. Agarwal (Duke University)
2. Alon Efrat (University of Arizona)
3. Swaminathan Sankararaman (Duke University)
4. Wuzhou Zhang (Duke University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{agarwal_pods12,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '12},
        title = {{Nearest-Neighbor Searching Under Uncertainty}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2213556.2213588},
        doi = {10.1145/2213556.2213588},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Agarwal, Pankaj K. and Efrat, Alon and Sankararaman, Swaminathan and Zhang, Wuzhou},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,744	Nearest Neighbor Classifiers over Incomplete Information: From Certain Answers to Certain Predictions	2021	VLDB	9.7253583e-05
7,186	Nearest Neighbor Searching Under Uncertainty II	2013	PODS	5.574492e-05
9,451	Optimal Spatial Dominance: An Effective Search of Nearest Neighbor Candidates	2015	SIGMOD	5.1613384e-05
10,140	Explaining k-Nearest Neighbors: Abductive and Counterfactual Explanations	2025	PODS	5.0597449e-05
12,371	Range-Max Queries on Uncertain Data	2016	PODS	4.9605343e-05
12,446	Supporting Data Uncertainty in Array Databases	2015	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 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	0.0019892478
1,403	Ranking Queries on Uncertain Data: A Probabilistic Threshold Approach	2008	SIGMOD	0.00010753743
1,641	Efficient Search for the Top-k Probable Nearest Neighbors in Uncertain Databases	2008	VLDB	9.9814769e-05
5,537	VoR-Tree: R-trees with Voronoi Diagrams for Efficient Processing of Spatial Nearest Neighbor Queries	2010	VLDB	6.075858e-05
5,900	Indexing Uncertain Data	2009	PODS	5.9363649e-05
6,885	Flexible Aggregate Similarity Search	2011	SIGMOD	5.6402295e-05

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10	7,186	Nearest Neighbor Searching Under Uncertainty II	2013	PODS