BiocNeighborIndex: The BiocNeighborIndex class
In LTLA/BiocNeighbors: Nearest Neighbor Detection for Bioconductor Packages

BiocNeighborIndex

R Documentation

The BiocNeighborIndex class

Description

A virtual class for indexing structures of different nearest-neighbor search algorithms. Developers should define subclasses for their own buildIndex and/or defineBuilder methods.

Details

In general, the internal structure of a BiocNeighborIndex class is arbitrary and left to the discretion of the developer. If an arbitrary structure is used, the associated methods should be written for all downstream generics like findKNN, etc.

Alternatively, developers may choose to derive from the BiocNeighborGenericIndex class. This expects:

A ptr slot containing an external pointer that refers to a BiocNeighbors::Prebuilt object (see definition in system.file("include", "BiocNeighbors.h", package="BiocNeighbors")).
A names slot containing a character vector with the names of the observations, or NULL if no names are available. This is used by subset= in the various find* generics.

In this case, no additional methods are required for the downstream generics.