R-tree

R-trees are tree data structures used for spatial access methods, i.e., for indexing multi-dimensional information such as geographical coordinates, rectangles or polygons. The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts. A common real-world usage for an R-tree might be to store spatial objects such as restaurant locations or the polygons that typical maps are made of: streets, buildings, outlines of lakes, coastlines, etc. and then find answers quickly to queries such as "Find all museums within 2 km of my current location", "retrieve all road segments within 2 km of my location" (to display them in a navigation system) or "find the nearest gas station" (although not taking roads into account). The R-tree can also accelerate nearest neighbor search for various distance metrics, including great-circle distance.

R-tree idea

The key idea of the data structure is to group nearby objects and represent them with their minimum bounding rectangle in the next higher level of the tree; the "R" in R-tree is for rectangle. Since all objects lie within this bounding rectangle, a query that does not intersect the bounding rectangle also cannot intersect any of the contained objects. At the leaf level, each rectangle describes a single object; at higher levels the aggregation of an increasing number of objects. This can also be seen as an increasingly coarse approximation of the data set.

R* tree

R*-trees are a variant of R-trees used for indexing spatial information. R*-trees have slightly higher construction cost than standard R-trees, as the data may need to be reinserted; but the resulting tree will usually have a better query performance. Like the standard R-tree, it can store both point and spatial data. It was proposed by Norbert Beckmann, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Ralf Schneider, and Bernhard Seeger in 1990.

Difference between R*-trees and R-trees

Minimization of both coverage and overlap is crucial to the performance of R-trees. Overlap means that, on data query or insertion, more than one branch of the tree needs to be expanded (due to the way data is being split in regions which may overlap). A minimized coverage improves pruning performance, allowing to exclude whole pages from search more often, in particular for negative range queries. The R*-tree attempts to reduce both, using a combination of a revised node split algorithm and the concept of forced reinsertion at node overflow. This is based on the observation that R-tree structures are highly susceptible to the order in which their entries are inserted, so an insertion-built (rather than bulk-loaded) structure is likely to be sub-optimal. Deletion and reinsertion of entries allows them to "find" a place in the tree that may be more appropriate than their original location.

R+ tree

An R+ tree is a method for looking up data using a location, often (x, y) coordinates, and often for locations on the surface of the earth. Searching on one number is a solved problem; searching on two or more, and asking for locations that are nearby in both x and y directions, requires craftier algorithms.

Fundamentally, an R+ tree is a tree data structure, a variant of the R tree, used for indexing spatial information.

Difference between R+ trees and R trees

R+ trees are a compromise between R-trees and kd-trees: they avoid overlapping of internal nodes by inserting an object into multiple leaves if necessary. Coverage is the entire area to cover all related rectangles. Overlap is the entire area which is contained in two or more nodes. Minimal coverage reduces the amount of "dead space" (empty area) which is covered by the nodes of the R-tree. Minimal overlap reduces the set of search paths to the leaves (even more critical for the access time than minimal coverage). Efficient search requires minimal coverage and overlap.