that is the problem. "Unless you have some additional knowledge about the distribution of your data"

no that is all i know about my data (more-or-less) i vould need to do some basin statistics on the data but that will take a while. this is a smaller part of a bigger project that is based on a lot of statistical info and as the project is reaching its end statistical assumptions that i have made to increase speed are not encouraging. the quality of my results has drastically decreased so now i am trying to fast broutforce as much i know/you guys help/other people suggest. and therefore any input is more then welcomed. thank you for that

"and I admit that I do not really understand what you proposed as a potential algorithm"

it is suppose to be a modification of nearest neighbor search with artificially designed pivots but now as a read it again it is a stupid suggestion that will never work, since my consensus histogram is constructed of maximums from the subject set therefore similarity score for each subject is just the sum of columns which is what i had in the first place. as you can see i am going in circles here.