Fast and Powerful Hashing using Tabulation

Randomized algorithms are often enjoyed for their simplicity, but the hash functions employed to yield the desired probabilistic guarantees are often too complicated to be practical. Here we survey recent results on how simple hashing schemes based on tabulation provide unexpectedly strong guarantees. Simple tabulation hashing dates back to Zobrist [1970]. Keys are viewed as consisting of $c$ characters and we have precomputed character tables $h_1,...,h_c$ mapping characters to random hash values. A key $x=(x_1,...,x_c)$ is hashed to $h_1[x_1] \oplus h_2[x_2].....\oplus h_c[x_c]$. This schemes is very fast with character tables in cache. While simple tabulation is not even 4-independent, it does provide many of the guarantees that are normally obtained via higher independence, e.g., linear probing and Cuckoo hashing. Next we consider twisted tabulation where one input character is "twisted" in a simple way. The resulting hash function has powerful distributional properties: Chernoff-Hoeffding type tail bounds and a very small bias for min-wise hashing. This also yields an extremely fast pseudo-random number generator that is provably good for many classic randomized algorithms and data-structures. Finally, we consider double tabulation where we compose two simple tabulation functions, applying one to the output of the other, and show that this yields very high independence in the classic framework of Carter and Wegman [1977]. In fact, w.h.p., for a given set of size proportional to that of the space consumed, double tabulation gives fully-random hashing. We also mention some more elaborate tabulation schemes getting near-optimal independence for given time and space. While these tabulation schemes are all easy to implement and use, their analysis is not

Answering Spatial Multiple-Set Intersection Queries Using 2-3 Cuckoo Hash-Filters

We show how to answer spatial multiple-set intersection queries in O(n(log w)/w + kt) expected time, where n is the total size of the t sets involved in the query, w is the number of bits in a memory word, k is the output size, and c is any fixed constant. This improves the asymptotic performance over previous solutions and is based on an interesting data structure, known as 2-3 cuckoo hash-filters. Our results apply in the word-RAM model (or practical RAM model), which allows for constant-time bit-parallel operations, such as bitwise AND, OR, NOT, and MSB (most-significant 1-bit), as exist in modern CPUs and GPUs. Our solutions apply to any multiple-set intersection queries in spatial data sets that can be reduced to one-dimensional range queries, such as spatial join queries for one-dimensional points or sets of points stored along space-filling curves, which are used in GIS applications.Comment: Full version of paper from 2017 ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information System