English

A Reinforcement Learning Based R-Tree for Spatial Data Indexing in Dynamic Environments

Databases 2021-10-12 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Learned indices have been proposed to replace classic index structures like B-Tree with machine learning (ML) models. They require to replace both the indices and query processing algorithms currently deployed by the databases, and such a radical departure is likely to encounter challenges and obstacles. In contrast, we propose a fundamentally different way of using ML techniques to improve on the query performance of the classic R-Tree without the need of changing its structure or query processing algorithms. Specifically, we develop reinforcement learning (RL) based models to decide how to choose a subtree for insertion and how to split a node when building an R-Tree, instead of relying on hand-crafted heuristic rules currently used by R-Tree and its variants. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets with up to more than 100 million spatial objects clearly show that our RL based index outperforms R-Tree and its variants in terms of query processing time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.04541,
  title  = {A Reinforcement Learning Based R-Tree for Spatial Data Indexing in Dynamic Environments},
  author = {Tu Gu and Kaiyu Feng and Gao Cong and Cheng Long and Zheng Wang and Sheng Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.04541},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T23:51:44.749Z