Constructing fading histograms from data streams

The ability to collect data is changing drastically. Nowadays, data are gathered in the form of transient and finite data streams. Memory restrictions preclude keeping all received data in memory. When dealing with massive data streams, it is mandatory to create compact representations of data, also known as synopses structures or summaries. Reducing memory occupancy is of utmost importance when handling a huge amount of data. This paper addresses the problem of constructing histograms from data streams under error constraints. When constructing online histograms from data streams there are two main characteristics to embrace: the updating facility and the error of the histogram. Moreover, in dynamic environments, besides the need of compact summaries to capture the most important properties of data, it is also essential to forget old data. Therefore, this paper presents sliding histograms and fading histograms, an abrupt and a smooth strategies to forget outdated data

Parallel mining of time-faded heavy hitters

In this paper we present PFDCMSS (Parallel Forward Decay Count-Min Space Saving) which, to the best of our knowledge, is the world first message-passing parallel algorithm for mining time-faded heavy hitters. The algorithm is a parallel version of the recently published FDCMSS (Forward Decay Count-Min Space Saving) sequential algorithm. We formally prove its correctness by showing that the underlying data structure, a sketch augmented with a Space Saving stream summary holding exactly two counters, is mergeable. Whilst mergeability of traditional sketches derives immediately from theory, we show that, instead, merging our augmented sketch is non trivial. Nonetheless, the resulting parallel algorithm is fast and simple to implement. The very large volumes of modern datasets in the context of Big Data present new challenges that current sequential algorithms can not cope with; on the contrary, parallel computing enables near real time processing of very large datasets, which are growing at an unprecedented scale. Our algorithm's implementation, taking advantage of the MPI (Message Passing Interface) library, is portable, reliable and provides cutting-edge performance. Extensive experimental results confirm that PFDCMSS retains the extreme accuracy and error bound provided by FDCMSS whilst providing excellent parallel scalability. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we prove the non trivial mergeability of the augmented sketch used in the FDCMSS algorithm; (ii) we derive PFDCMSS, a novel message-passing parallel algorithm; (iii) we experimentally prove that PFDCMSS is extremely accurate and scalable, allowing near real time processing of large datasets. The result supports both casual users and seasoned, professional scientists working on expert and intelligent systems

On Frequency Estimation and Detection of Heavy Hitters in Data Streams

A stream can be thought of as a very large set of data, sometimes even infinite, which arrives sequentially and must be processed without the possibility of being stored. In fact, the memory available to the algorithm is limited and it is not possible to store the whole stream of data which is instead scanned upon arrival and summarized through a succinct data structure in order to maintain only the information of interest. Two of the main tasks related to data stream processing are frequency estimation and heavy hitter detection. The frequency estimation problem requires estimating the frequency of each item, that is the number of times or the weight with which each appears in the stream, while heavy hitter detection means the detection of all those items with a frequency higher than a fixed threshold. In this work we design and analyze ACMSS, an algorithm for frequency estimation and heavy hitter detection, and compare it against the state of the art ASKETCH algorithm. We show that, given the same budgeted amount of memory, for the task of frequency estimation our algorithm outperforms ASKETCH with regard to accuracy. Furthermore, we show that, under the assumptions stated by its authors, ASKETCH may not be able to report all of the heavy hitters whilst ACMSS will provide with high probability the full list of heavy hitters