K-d tree

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A k-d tree (short for _k_-dimensional tree) is a space-partitioning data structure for organizing points in a k-dimensional space. k-d trees are a useful data structure for several applications, such as searches involving a multidimensional search key (e.g. range searches and nearest neighbor searches). k-d trees are a special case of binary space partitioning trees. k-d trees are not suitable, however, for efficiently finding the nearest neighbor in high dimensional spaces. As a general rule, if the dimensionality is k, the number of points in the data, N, should be N ≫ 2k. Otherwise, when k-d trees are used with high-dimensional data, most of the points in the tree will be evaluated and the efficiency is no better than exhaustive search, and other methods such as approximate nearest-neighbor are used instead.