A vector database is a specialized database for storing, indexing, and querying high-dimensional data, commonly used in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). High-dimensional data represent objects like images or text in mathematical form, using vectors. The numbers within these vectors represent the object’s attributes, such as the shapes within an image.
For example, consider a recommendation system for an online clothing line. Each piece of clothing is represented as a vector, where the values within the vector encode different attributes of the clothing piece, such as clothing type and color.
When a customer is searching for a similar clothing piece, the recommendation system uses the clothing piece’s vector representation to suggestion other similar or related clothing pieces using vector representations with similar attributes from the vector database, such as color.
Clothing pieces that have vectors close to each other in the high-dimensional space are recommended as they share similar traits.