  We study the problem of constructing a reverse nearest neighbor (RNN) heat
map by finding the RNN set of every point in a two-dimensional space. Based on
the RNN set of a point, we obtain a quantitative influence (i.e., heat) for the
point. The heat map provides a global view on the influence distribution in the
space, and hence supports exploratory analyses in many applications such as
marketing and resource management. To construct such a heat map, we first
reduce it to a problem called Region Coloring (RC), which divides the space
into disjoint regions within which all the points have the same RNN set. We
then propose a novel algorithm named CREST that efficiently solves the RC
problem by labeling each region with the heat value of its containing points.
In CREST, we propose innovative techniques to avoid processing expensive RNN
queries and greatly reduce the number of region labeling operations. We perform
detailed analyses on the complexity of CREST and lower bounds of the RC
problem, and prove that CREST is asymptotically optimal in the worst case.
Extensive experiments with both real and synthetic data sets demonstrate that
CREST outperforms alternative algorithms by several orders of magnitude.
