Continuous Monitoring of l_p Norms in Data Streams

In insertion-only streaming, one sees a sequence of indices a_1, a_2, ..., a_m in [n]. The stream defines a sequence of m frequency vectors x(1), ..., x(m) each in R^n, where x(t) is the frequency vector of items after seeing the first t indices in the stream. Much work in the streaming literature focuses on estimating some function f(x(m)). Many applications though require obtaining estimates at time t of f(x(t)), for every t in [m]. Naively this guarantee is obtained by devising an algorithm with failure probability less than 1/m, then performing a union bound over all stream updates to guarantee that all m estimates are simultaneously accurate with good probability. When f(x) is some l_p norm of x, recent works have shown that this union bound is wasteful and better space complexity is possible for the continuous monitoring problem, with the strongest known results being for p=2. In this work, we improve the state of the art for all 0<p<2, which we obtain via a novel analysis of Indyk\u27s p-stable sketch

Almost-Smooth Histograms and Sliding-Window Graph Algorithms

We study algorithms for the sliding-window model, an important variant of the data-stream model, in which the goal is to compute some function of a fixed-length suffix of the stream. We extend the smooth-histogram framework of Braverman and Ostrovsky (FOCS 2007) to almost-smooth functions, which includes all subadditive functions. Specifically, we show that if a subadditive function can be $(1+\epsilon)$-approximated in the insertion-only streaming model, then it can be $(2+\epsilon)$-approximated also in the sliding-window model with space complexity larger by factor $O(\epsilon^{-1}\log w)$, where $w$ is the window size. We demonstrate how our framework yields new approximation algorithms with relatively little effort for a variety of problems that do not admit the smooth-histogram technique. For example, in the frequency-vector model, a symmetric norm is subadditive and thus we obtain a sliding-window $(2+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for it. Another example is for streaming matrices, where we derive a new sliding-window $(\sqrt{2}+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for Schatten $4$-norm. We then consider graph streams and show that many graph problems are subadditive, including maximum submodular matching, minimum vertex-cover, and maximum $k$-cover, thereby deriving sliding-window $O(1)$-approximation algorithms for them almost for free (using known insertion-only algorithms). Finally, we design for every $d\in (1,2]$ an artificial function, based on the maximum-matching size, whose almost-smoothness parameter is exactly $d$