Bandit-Based Monte Carlo Optimization for Nearest Neighbors

The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive random sampling. The technique converts an optimization problem into a statistical estimation problem which is then solved via multi-armed bandits. We apply this technique to solve the problem of high-dimensional k -nearest neighbors, developing an algorithm which we prove is able to identify exact nearest neighbors with high probability. We show that under regularity assumptions on a dataset of n points in d -dimensional space, the complexity of our algorithm scales logarithmically with the dimension of the data as O\left({(n+d)\log ^{2} \frac {nd}{\delta }}\right) for error probability \delta , rather than linearly as in exact computation requiring O(nd) . We corroborate our theoretical results with numerical simulations, showing that our algorithm outperforms both exact computation and state-of-the-art algorithms such as kGraph, NGT, and LSH on real datasets.