Efficient Similar Region Search with Deep Metric Learning

With the proliferation of mobile devices and location-based services, rich geo-tagged data is becoming prevalent and this offer great opportunities to understand different geographical regions (e.g., shopping areas). However, the huge number of regions with complicated spatial information are expensive for people to explore and understand. To solve this issue, we study the problem of searching similar regions given a user specified query region. The problem is challenging in both similarity definition and search efficiency. To tackle the two challenges, we propose a novel solution equipped by (1) a deep learning approach to learning the similarity that considers both object attributes and the relative locations between objects; and (2) an efficient branch and bound search algorithm for finding top-N similar regions. Moreover, we propose an approximation method to further improve the efficiency by slightly sacrificing the accuracy. Our experiments on three real world datasets demonstrate that our solution improves both the accuracy and search efficiency by a significant margin compared with the state-of-the-art methods.