Hands-off Model Integration in Spatial Index Structures
This work addresses performance and memory efficiency issues for spatial data analysis in domains like IoT, representing an incremental improvement by applying existing techniques to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of accelerating queries on spatial indexes by integrating light-weight machine learning models, specifically using interpolation techniques on R-trees, resulting in up to 60% reduction in query execution time and over 90% reduction in memory footprint.
Spatial indexes are crucial for the analysis of the increasing amounts of spatial data, for example generated through IoT applications. The plethora of indexes that has been developed in recent decades has primarily been optimised for disk. With increasing amounts of memory even on commodity machines, however, moving them to main memory is an option. Doing so opens up the opportunity to use additional optimizations that are only amenable to main memory. In this paper we thus explore the opportunity to use light-weight machine learning models to accelerate queries on spatial indexes. We do so by exploring the potential of using interpolation and similar techniques on the R-tree, arguably the most broadly used spatial index. As we show in our experimental analysis, the query execution time can be reduced by up to 60% while simultaneously shrinking the index's memory footprint by over 90%