M tree

The document proposes an extension to the M-tree family of index structures called M*-tree. M*-tree improves upon M-tree by maintaining a nearest-neighbor graph within each node. The nearest-neighbor graph stores, for each entry in a node, a reference and distance to its nearest neighbor among the other entries in that node. This additional structure allows for more efficient filtering of non-relevant subtrees during search queries through the use of "sacrifice pivots". The experiments showed that M*-tree can perform searches significantly faster than M-tree while keeping construction costs low.