libfbi: a C++ implementation for fast box intersection and application to sparse mass spectrometry data

Algorithms for sparse data require fast search and subset selection capabilities for the determination of point neighborhoods. A natural data representation for such cases are space partitioning data structures. However, the associated range queries assume noise-free observations and cannot take into account observation-specific uncertainty estimates that are present in e.g. modern mass spectrometry data. In order to accommodate the inhomogeneous noise characteristics of sparse real-world datasets, point queries need to be reformulated in terms of box intersection queries, where box sizes correspond to uncertainty regions for each observation.