Continuous similarity search for evolving queries

In this paper, we study a novel problem of continuous similarity search for evolving queries. Given a set of objects, each being a set or multiset of items, and a data stream, we want to continuously maintain the top-k most similar objects using the last n items in the stream as an evolving query. We show that the problem has several important applications. At the same time, the problem is challenging. We develop a filtering-based method and a hashing-based method. Our experimental results on both real data sets and synthetic data sets show that our methods are effective and efficient.