Efficient similarity joins on massive high-dimensional datasets using MapReduce

High-dimensional similarity join (HDSJ) is critical for many novel applications in the domain of mobile data management. Nowadays, performing HDSJs efficiently faces two challenges. First, the scale of datasets is increasing rapidly, making parallel computing on a scalable platform a must. Second, the dimensionality of the data can be up to hundreds or even thousands, which brings about the issue of dimensionality curse. In this paper, we address these challenges and study how to perform parallel HDSJs efficiently in the MapReduce paradigm. Particularly, we propose a cost model to demonstrate that it is important to take both communication and computation costs into account as dimensionality and data volume increases. To this end, we propose DAA (Dimension Aggregation Approximation), an efficient compression approach that can help significantly reduce both these costs when performing parallel HDSJs. Moreover, we design DAA-based parallel HDSJ algorithms which can scale up to massive data sizes and very high dimensionality. We perform extensive experiments using both synthetic and real datasets to evaluate the speedup and the scale up of our algorithms.