1 research outputs found
A Memory-Efficient Sketch Method for Estimating High Similarities in Streaming Sets
Estimating set similarity and detecting highly similar sets are fundamental
problems in areas such as databases, machine learning, and information
retrieval. MinHash is a well-known technique for approximating Jaccard
similarity of sets and has been successfully used for many applications such as
similarity search and large scale learning. Its two compressed versions, b-bit
MinHash and Odd Sketch, can significantly reduce the memory usage of the
original MinHash method, especially for estimating high similarities (i.e.,
similarities around 1). Although MinHash can be applied to static sets as well
as streaming sets, of which elements are given in a streaming fashion and
cardinality is unknown or even infinite, unfortunately, b-bit MinHash and Odd
Sketch fail to deal with streaming data. To solve this problem, we design a
memory efficient sketch method, MaxLogHash, to accurately estimate Jaccard
similarities in streaming sets. Compared to MinHash, our method uses smaller
sized registers (each register consists of less than 7 bits) to build a compact
sketch for each set. We also provide a simple yet accurate estimator for
inferring Jaccard similarity from MaxLogHash sketches. In addition, we derive
formulas for bounding the estimation error and determine the smallest necessary
memory usage (i.e., the number of registers used for a MaxLogHash sketch) for
the desired accuracy. We conduct experiments on a variety of datasets, and
experimental results show that our method MaxLogHash is about 5 times more
memory efficient than MinHash with the same accuracy and computational cost for
estimating high similarities