rnndescent
is an R package for finding approximate
nearest neighbors, based heavily on the Python package PyNNDescent by Leland McInnes, but is a fully
independent reimplementation written in C++. It uses the following
techniques:
The easiest way to find k-nearest neighbors and query new data is to
use the rnnd_knn
function, which combine several of the
available techniques into sensible defaults use the
rnnd_build
and rnnd_query
functions. For
greater flexibility, the underlying functions used by
rnnd_build
and rnnd_query
can be used
directly. The other vignettes in this package describe their use and go
into more detail about the how the methods work.
If you just want the k-nearest neighbors of some data, use
rnnd_knn
:
The nearest neighbor graph format returned by all functions in this package is a list of two matrices:
idx
– a matrix of indices of the nearest neighbors. As
usual in R, these are 1-indexed.dist
– the equivalent distances.lapply(iris_knn, function(x) {
head(x, 3)
})
#> $idx
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 1 18 5 29 28
#> [2,] 2 13 46 35 10
#> [3,] 3 48 4 7 46
#>
#> $dist
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 0 0.1000000 0.1414212 0.1414212 0.1414213
#> [2,] 0 0.1414213 0.1414213 0.1414213 0.1732050
#> [3,] 0 0.1414213 0.2449490 0.2645751 0.2645753
rnnd_knn
returns the k-nearest neighbors, but does not
return any “index” that you can use to query new data. To do that, use
rnnd_build
. Normally you would query the index with
different from that which you used to build the index, so let’s split
iris
up:
iris_even <- iris[seq_len(nrow(iris)) %% 2 == 0, ]
iris_odd <- iris[seq_len(nrow(iris)) %% 2 == 1, ]
The index is also a list but with a lot more components (none of
which are intended for manual examination), apart from the the neighbor
graph which can be found under the graph
component in the
same format as the return value of rnnd_knn
:
lapply(iris_index$graph, function(x) {
head(x, 3)
})
#> $idx
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 1 23 5 13 18
#> [2,] 2 24 15 23 5
#> [3,] 3 10 11 17 14
#>
#> $dist
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 0 0.1414213 0.1732050 0.2236068 0.3000000
#> [2,] 0 0.1414215 0.1732051 0.2645753 0.3162279
#> [3,] 0 0.3872986 0.4123107 0.4795830 0.5291505
Be aware that for large and high-dimensional data, the returned index
can get very large, especially if you set
n_search_trees
to a large value.
To query new data, use rnnd_query
:
iris_odd_nn <- rnnd_query(
index = iris_index,
query = iris_odd,
k = 5
)
lapply(iris_odd_nn, function(x) {
head(x, 3)
})
#> $idx
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 9 20 14 4 25
#> [2,] 24 2 23 15 1
#> [3,] 19 9 4 14 20
#>
#> $dist
#> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
#> [1,] 0.1000000 0.1414213 0.1414213 0.1732050 0.2236068
#> [2,] 0.1414213 0.2449490 0.2645753 0.3000001 0.3000002
#> [3,] 0.1414213 0.1732050 0.2236066 0.2449488 0.2449488
You don’t need to keep the data that was used to build the index around, because internally, the index stores that (that’s one of the reasons the index can get large).
Another use for rnnd_query
is to improve the quality of
a k-nearest neighbor graph. We are using for a query
the
same data we used to build iris_index
and specifying via
the init
parameter the knn graph we already generated:
iris_knn_improved <- rnnd_query(
index = iris_index,
query = iris_even,
init = iris_index$graph,
k = 5
)
If the k-nearest neighbor graph in index$graph
isn’t
sufficiently high quality, then result of running
rnnd_query
on the same data should be an improvement.
Exactly how much better is hard to say, but you can always compare the
sum of the distances:
In this case, the initial knn has not been improved, which is hardly
surprising due to the size of the dataset. Another function that might
be of use is the neighbor_overlap
function to see how many
neighbors are shared between the two graphs:
As there was no change to the graph, the overlap is 100%. More details on this can be found in the hubness vignette and a more ambitious dataset is covered in the FMNIST article.
rnndescent
is multi-threaded, but by default is
single-threaded. Set n_threads
to set the number of threads
you want to use:
Several different distances are available in rnndescent
beyond the typically-supported Euclidean and Cosine-based distances in
other nearest neighbor packages. See the metrics vignette for more details.
dgCMatrix
. All the same
distances are supported as for dense matrices.logical
matrix, then for certain distances intended for
binary data, specialized functions will be used to speed up the
computation.There are several options that rnnd_build
and
rnnd_query
expose that can be modified to change the
behavior of the different stages of the algorithm. See the documentation
for those functions (e.g. ?rnnd_build
) or the Random Partition Forests, Nearest Neighbor Descent and Querying Data vignettes for more
details.