Maximum rank query
Kyriakos Mouratidis, Jilian Zhang, HweeHwa Pang · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · 2015
The top-kquery is a common means to shortlist a number of options from a set of alternatives, based on the user's preferences. Typically, these preferences are expressed as a vector of query weights, defined over the options' attributes. The query vector implicitly associates each alternative with a numeric score, and thus imposes a ranking among them. The top-kresult includes thekoptions with the highest scores. In this context, we define themaximum rankquery (MaxRank). Given a focal option in a set of alternatives, theMaxRankproblem is to compute the highest rank this option may achieve under any possible user preference, and furthermore, to report all the regions in the query vector's domain where that rank is achieved.MaxRankfinds application in market impact analysis, customer profiling, targeted advertising, etc. We propose a methodology forMaxRankprocessing and evaluate it with experiments on real and benchmark synthetic datasets.