Radix Sorting With No Extra Space

It is well known that n integers in the range [1,n^c] can be sorted in O(n) time in the RAM model using radix sorting. More generally, integers in any range [1,U] can be sorted in O(n sqrt{loglog n}) time. However, these algorithms use O(n) words of extra memory. Is this necessary? We present a simple, stable, integer sorting algorithm for words of size O(log n), which works in O(n) time and uses only O(1) words of extra memory on a RAM model. This is the integer sorting case most useful in practice. We extend this result with same bounds to the case when the keys are read-only, which is of theoretical interest. Another interesting question is the case of arbitrary c. Here we present a black-box transformation from any RAM sorting algorithm to a sorting algorithm which uses only O(1) extra space and has the same running time. This settles the complexity of in-place sorting in terms of the complexity of sorting.Comment: Full version of paper accepted to ESA 2007. (17 pages

On the Complexity of Mining Itemsets from the Crowd Using Taxonomies

We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them. The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that measures the number of crowd questions required to identify the frequent itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity, that measures the computational effort required to choose the questions. We provide lower and upper complexity bounds in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as well as the size of a concise description of the output itemsets. We also provide constructive algorithms that achieve the upper bounds, and consider more efficient variants for practical situations.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures. To be published to ICDT'13. Added missing acknowledgemen

Some results on tries with adaptive branching

AbstractWe study a modification of digital trees (or tries) with adaptive multi-digit branching. Such tries can dynamically adjust degrees of their nodes by choosing the number of digits to be processed per lookup. While we do not specify any particular method for selecting the degrees of nodes, we assume that such selection can be accomplished by examining the number of strings remaining in each sub-tree, and/or estimating parameters of the input distribution. We call this class of digital trees adaptive multi-digit tries (or AMD-tries) and provide a preliminary analysis of their expected behavior in a memoryless model. We establish the following results: (1) there exist AMD-tries attaining a constant expected time of a successful search; (2) there exist AMD-tries consuming a linear (in the number of strings inserted) amount of space; (3) both constant search time and linear space usage can be attained if the (memoryless) source is symmetric. We accompany our analysis with a brief survey of several known types of adaptive trie structures, and show how our analysis extends (and/or complements) previous results