On Distribution Dependent Sub-Logarithmic Query Time of Learned Indexing
Sepanta Zeighami Cyrus Shahabi
A fundamental problem in data management is to find the elements in an array
that match a query. Recently, learned indexes are being extensively used to
solve this problem, where they learn a model to predict the location of the
items in the array. They are empirically shown to outperform non-learned
methods (e.g., B-trees or binary search that answer queries in $O(\log n)$
time) by orders of magnitude. However, success of learned indexes has not been
theoretically justified. Only existing attempt shows the same query time of
$O(\log n)$, but with a constant factor improvement in space complexity over
non-learned methods, under some assumptions on data distribution. In this
paper, we significantly strengthen this result, showing that under mild
assumptions on data distribution, and the same space complexity as non-learned
methods, learned indexes can answer queries in $O(\log\log n)$ expected query
time. We also show that allowing for slightly larger but still near-linear
space overhead, a learned index can achieve $O(1)$ expected query time. Our
results theoretically prove learned indexes are orders of magnitude faster than
non-learned methods, theoretically grounding their empirical success.