An efficient skyline maintenance method for data modification

Skyline queries are useful in many applications such as multicriteria decision making, data mining, and user-preference queries. However, the data points may be modified as time goes by. The price of a certain flight ticket or the performances of the players are examples. Generally, in previous studies, two simple ways are used to maintain the skyline for this situation. That is, deleting the data that need to be modified first and then inserting the updated object as a new one or inserting the updated object first and then deleting the old one. However, data deletion breaks the dominance relationship between data points, and generates a lot of temporary skyline points. Moreover, if data modification is treated as data deletion/insertion, we need to perform dominance test to all data points twice which is inefficient for skyline maintaining. In this paper, by considering the dominance relationship between the data before and after modification, an efficient method for maintaining skyline is proposed. Moreover, a set of simulation is performed to show the benefit of the approach.