The problem of estimating frequency moments of a data stream has attracted a lot of attention since the onset of streaming algorithms [AMS99]. While the space complexity for approximately computing the $p^{\rm th}$ moment, for $p\in(0,2]$ has been settled [KNW10], for $p>2$ the exact complexity remains open. For $p>2$ the current best algorithm uses $O(n^{1-2/p}\log n)$ words of space [AKO11,BO10], whereas the lower bound is of $Ω(n^{1-2/p})$ [BJKS04].
In this paper, we show a tight lower bound of $Ω(n^{1-2/p}\log n)$ words for the class of algorithms based on linear sketches, which store only a sketch $Ax$ of input vector $x$ and some (possibly randomized) matrix $A$. We note that all known algorithms for this problem are linear sketches.
We resolve the space complexity of linear sketches for approximating the maximum matching problem in dynamic graph streams where the stream may include both edge insertion and deletion. Specifically, we show that for any $ε> 0$, there exists a one-pass streaming algorithm, which only maintains a linear sketch of size $\tilde{O}(n^{2-3ε})$ bits and recovers an $n^ε$-approximate maximum matching in dynamic graph streams, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the graph. In contrast to the extensively studied insertion-only model, to the best of our knowledge, no non-trivial single-pass streaming…
Given a stream with frequencies $f_d$, for $d\in[n]$, we characterize the space necessary for approximating the frequency negative moments $F_p=\sum |f_d|^p$, where $p<0$ and the sum is taken over all items $d\in[n]$ with nonzero frequency, in terms of $n$, $ε$, and $m=\sum |f_d|$. To accomplish this, we actually prove a much more general result. Given any nonnegative and nonincreasing function $g$, we characterize the space necessary for any streaming algorithm that outputs a $(1\pmε)$-approximation to $\sum g(|f_d|)$, where again the sum is over items with nonzero frequency. The storage requ…
We consider the problem of sketching the $p$-th frequency moment of a vector, $p>2$, with multiplicative error at most $1\pm ε$ and \emph{with high confidence} $1-δ$. Despite the long sequence of work on this problem, tight bounds on this quantity are only known for constant $δ$. While one can obtain an upper bound with error probability $δ$ by repeating a sketching algorithm with constant error probability $O(\log(1/δ))$ times in parallel, and taking the median of the outputs, we show this is a suboptimal algorithm! Namely, we show optimal upper and lower bounds of $Θ(n^{1-2/p} \log(1/δ) + n^…
Measuring the distances between vertices on graphs is one of the most fundamental components in network analysis. Since finding shortest paths requires traversing the graph, it is challenging to obtain distance information on large graphs very quickly. In this work, we present a preprocessing algorithm that is able to create landmark based distance sketches efficiently, with strong theoretical guarantees. When evaluated on a diverse set of social and information networks, our algorithm significantly improves over existing approaches by reducing the number of landmarks stored, preprocessing tim…
In this paper, we introduce a new model for sublinear algorithms called \emph{dynamic sketching}. In this model, the underlying data is partitioned into a large \emph{static} part and a small \emph{dynamic} part and the goal is to compute a summary of the static part (i.e, a \emph{sketch}) such that given any \emph{update} for the dynamic part, one can combine it with the sketch to compute a given function. We say that a sketch is \emph{compact} if its size is bounded by a polynomial function of the length of the dynamic data, (essentially) independent of the size of the static part. A graph o…
Computing space-efficient summary, or \textit{a.k.a. sketches}, of large data, is a central problem in the streaming algorithm. Such sketches are used to answer \textit{post-hoc} queries in several data analytics tasks. The algorithm for computing sketches typically requires to be fast, accurate, and space-efficient. A fundamental problem in the streaming algorithm framework is that of computing the frequency moments of data streams. The frequency moments of a sequence containing $f_i$ elements of type $i$, are the numbers $\mathbf{F}_k=\sum_{i=1}^n {f_i}^k,$ where $i\in [n]$. This is also cal…
This paper develops sharp bounds on moments of sums of k-wise independent bounded random variables, under constrained average variance. The result closes the problem addressed in part in the previous works of Schmidt et al. and Bellare, Rompel. We The work also discuss discusses other applications of independent interests, such as asymptotically sharp bounds on binomial moments.
We consider the following oblivious sketching problem: given $ε\in (0,1/3)$ and $n \geq d/ε^2$, design a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^{k \times nd}$ and a function $f: \mathbb{R}^k \times \mathbb{R}^{nd} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$, so that for any $n \times d$ matrix $A$, $$\Pr_{S \sim \mathcal{D}} [(1-ε) \|A\|_{op} \leq f(S(A),S) \leq (1+ε)\|A\|_{op}] \geq 2/3,$$ where $\|A\|_{op}$ is the operator norm of $A$ and $S(A)$ denotes $S \cdot A$, interpreting $A$ as a vector in $\mathbb{R}^{nd}$. We show a tight lower bound of $k = Ω(d^2/ε^2)$ for this problem. Our result considerably s…
We study classic streaming and sparse recovery problems using deterministic linear sketches, including l1/l1 and linf/l1 sparse recovery problems (the latter also being known as l1-heavy hitters), norm estimation, and approximate inner product. We focus on devising a fixed matrix A in R^{m x n} and a deterministic recovery/estimation procedure which work for all possible input vectors simultaneously. Our results improve upon existing work, the following being our main contributions: * A proof that linf/l1 sparse recovery and inner product estimation are equivalent, and that incoherent matrices…
The traditional requirement for a randomized streaming algorithm is just {\em one-shot}, i.e., algorithm should be correct (within the stated $\eps$-error bound) at the end of the stream. In this paper, we study the {\em tracking} problem, where the output should be correct at all times. The standard approach for solving the tracking problem is to run $O(\log m)$ independent instances of the one-shot algorithm and apply the union bound to all $m$ time instances. In this paper, we study if this standard approach can be improved, for the classical frequency moment problem. We show that for the $…
We initiate a broad study of classical problems in the streaming model with insertions and deletions in the setting where we allow the approximation factor $α$ to be much larger than $1$. Such algorithms can use significantly less memory than the usual setting for which $α= 1+ε$ for an $ε\in (0,1)$. We study large approximations for a number of problems in sketching and streaming and the following are some of our results. For the $\ell_p$ norm/quasinorm $\|x\|_p$ of an $n$-dimensional vector $x$, $0 < p \le 2$, we show that obtaining a $\poly(n)$-approximation requires the same amount of memor…
Given data stream $D = \{p_1,p_2,...,p_m\}$ of size $m$ of numbers from $\{1,..., n\}$, the frequency of $i$ is defined as $f_i = |\{j: p_j = i\}|$. The $k$-th \emph{frequency moment} of $D$ is defined as $F_k = \sum_{i=1}^n f_i^k$. We consider the problem of approximating frequency moments in insertion-only streams for $k\ge 3$. For any constant $c$ we show an $O(n^{1-2/k}\log(n)\log^{(c)}(n))$ upper bound on the space complexity of the problem. Here $\log^{(c)}(n)$ is the iterative $\log$ function. To simplify the presentation, we make the following assumptions: $n$ and $m$ are polynomially …
Estimating frequency moments of data streams is a very well studied problem and tight bounds are known on the amount of space that is necessary and sufficient when the stream is adversarially ordered. Recently, motivated by various practical considerations and applications in learning and statistics, there has been growing interest into studying streams that are randomly ordered. In the paper we improve the previous lower bounds on the space required to estimate the frequency moments of a randomly ordered streams.
