Sublinear Maximum Inner Product Search using Concomitants of Extreme Order Statistics

We propose a novel dimensionality reduction method for maximum inner product search (MIPS), named CEOs, based on the theory of concomitants of extreme order statistics. Utilizing the asymptotic behavior of these concomitants, we show that a few dimensions associated with the extreme values of the query signature are enough to estimate inner products. Since CEOs only uses the sign of a small subset of the query signature for estimation, we can precompute all inner product estimators accurately before querying. These properties yield a sublinear MIPS algorithm with an exponential indexing space complexity. We show that our exponential space is optimal for the (1 + ε)-approximate MIPS on a unit sphere. The search recall of CEOs can be theoretically guaranteed under a mild condition. To deal with the exponential space complexity, we propose two practical variants, including sCEOs-TA and coCEOs, that use linear space for solving MIPS. sCEOs-TA exploits the threshold algorithm (TA) and provides superior search recalls to competitive MIPS solvers. coCEOs is a data and dimension co-reduction technique and outperforms sCEOs-TA on high recall requirements. Empirically, they are very simple to implement and achieve at least 100x speedup compared to the bruteforce search while returning top-10 MIPS with accuracy at least 90% on many large-scale data sets.