Would nearest point using Geodesic distance and nearest point using Haversine distance be the same point?

Question

I have a point A and trying to find the nearest point to A in a list of points (B, C, D).

I could use knn with haversine metrics and get the nearest point like this:

knn = NearestNeighbors(n_neighbors=1, metric='haversine')

knn.fit(df['lat', 'lon']) 

dist, idx = knn.kneighbors([(35.9157825, -79.0826045)])

However, I'm not sure if this point df.loc[idx] will always be the same point i'd get if I calculate distance using geodesic?

knn is very fast compared to having to calculate geodesic distance for all the points in my list. So I would love to use knn if the nearest point would always be the same.

Answer 1

For sure, "closest" will return different points, in general, for great-circle (what you call haversine) and geodesic distances. For a specific example, consider the set of points {A, B} where the positions (lat, lon) are: A = (10.03°, 0°); B = (0°, 10°). The point P = (0°, 0°) is closest to B according to the great-circle distance, but is closest to A according to the geodesic distance (for the WGS84 ellipsoid).

GeographicLib (written by me) offers a NearestNeighbor class which implements a vantage-point tree, which is an efficient method of finding the nearest neighbor in any metric space. (Geodesic distance defines a metric space.) There's a python implementation of vantage-point trees available here.