What is "bk-tree"

A BK-tree is a metric tree suggested by Walter Austin Burkhard and Robert M. Keller specifically adapted to discrete metric spaces. For simplicity, let us consider integer discrete metric d(x, y). Then, BK-tree is defined in the following way. An arbitrary element a is selected as root node. The root node may have zero or more subtrees. The k-th subtree is recursively built of all elements b such that d(a, b) = k. BK-trees can be used for approximate string matching in a dictionary .