15,287 research outputs found
Estimating Entropy of Data Streams Using Compressed Counting
The Shannon entropy is a widely used summary statistic, for example, network
traffic measurement, anomaly detection, neural computations, spike trains, etc.
This study focuses on estimating Shannon entropy of data streams. It is known
that Shannon entropy can be approximated by Reenyi entropy or Tsallis entropy,
which are both functions of the p-th frequency moments and approach Shannon
entropy as p->1.
Compressed Counting (CC) is a new method for approximating the p-th frequency
moments of data streams. Our contributions include:
1) We prove that Renyi entropy is (much) better than Tsallis entropy for
approximating Shannon entropy.
2) We propose the optimal quantile estimator for CC, which considerably
improves the previous estimators.
3) Our experiments demonstrate that CC is indeed highly effective
approximating the moments and entropies. We also demonstrate the crucial
importance of utilizing the variance-bias trade-off
On Practical Algorithms for Entropy Estimation and the Improved Sample Complexity of Compressed Counting
Estimating the p-th frequency moment of data stream is a very heavily studied
problem. The problem is actually trivial when p = 1, assuming the strict
Turnstile model. The sample complexity of our proposed algorithm is essentially
O(1) near p=1. This is a very large improvement over the previously believed
O(1/eps^2) bound. The proposed algorithm makes the long-standing problem of
entropy estimation an easy task, as verified by the experiments included in the
appendix
Towards Optimal Moment Estimation in Streaming and Distributed Models
One of the oldest problems in the data stream model is to approximate the p-th moment ||X||_p^p = sum_{i=1}^n X_i^p of an underlying non-negative vector X in R^n, which is presented as a sequence of poly(n) updates to its coordinates. Of particular interest is when p in (0,2]. Although a tight space bound of Theta(epsilon^-2 log n) bits is known for this problem when both positive and negative updates are allowed, surprisingly there is still a gap in the space complexity of this problem when all updates are positive. Specifically, the upper bound is O(epsilon^-2 log n) bits, while the lower bound is only Omega(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits. Recently, an upper bound of O~(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits was obtained under the assumption that the updates arrive in a random order.
We show that for p in (0, 1], the random order assumption is not needed. Namely, we give an upper bound for worst-case streams of O~(epsilon^-2 + log n) bits for estimating |X |_p^p. Our techniques also give new upper bounds for estimating the empirical entropy in a stream. On the other hand, we show that for p in (1,2], in the natural coordinator and blackboard distributed communication topologies, there is an O~(epsilon^-2) bit max-communication upper bound based on a randomized rounding scheme. Our protocols also give rise to protocols for heavy hitters and approximate matrix product. We generalize our results to arbitrary communication topologies G, obtaining an O~(epsilon^2 log d) max-communication upper bound, where d is the diameter of G. Interestingly, our upper bound rules out natural communication complexity-based approaches for proving an Omega(epsilon^-2 log n) bit lower bound for p in (1,2] for streaming algorithms. In particular, any such lower bound must come from a topology with large diameter
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