StreamLib

python library for streaming algorithms

Document can be found in http://xmerge.me/StreamLib/.

Overview

Algorithms included:

• Sketch
  • Count Min Sketch [cm05] -- DONE
  • Count Median Sketch [cm05] -- DONE
  • Count Sketch [ccfc04] -- DONE
  • BJKST Sketch [bjkst]
  • Misra-Gries Sketch [mg82]
  • F2 Sketch [ams] -- DONE
  • Quantile Sketch [myblog]
  • ...

Above algorithms share several common features, we could therefore specify a bunch of common methods, here are some.

class Sketch(object):
   """
   Interface for Sketch.
   """
   @abstractmethod
   def processBatch(self, *args, **kwargs):
      """
      Summarize data stream in batch mode.
      """
      raise NotImplemented()

   @abstractmethod
   def processItem(self, *args, **kwargs):
      """
      Summarize one item in a data stream.
      """
      raise NotImplemented()

   @abstractmethod
   def estimate(self, *args, **kwargs):
      """
      Estimate properties of given item/key.
      """
      raise NotImplemented()

   @abstractmethod
   def merge(self, *args, **kwargs):
      """
      Merge compatible sketches.
      """
      raise NotImplemented()

   @abstractmethod
   def __add__(self, other):
      return self.merge(other)

Data Stream

Any iterable object with hashable elements can be considered as a data stream. Here are some examples.

• a list of integers: [1, 10, 20, 1, 5]
• a generator that yields tuples, see the instance dataStream as follows,

import random

def demoGen(N = 1000):
    i = 0
    while i < N:
        yield random.randint(0, 10);
        i += 1

dataStream = demoGen()

• a tuple of strings: ('fix', 'the', 'bug', please', '...')
• a string: 'abcdefgdahfahdfajkhfkahfsahfjksfhjk'
• many more

Summarize the data stream

Many algorithms that are popular to summarize data streams are included in the module streamlib. We give some examples to show their basic usage.

Count-Min Sketch

Count-Min sketch [cm05] is used to summarize the data stream and estimate the frequency of each element in the data stream. This sketch give high accurate estimation to heavy hitters (elements that have high frequencies) while relatively large error may induced for light elements. See following example for the basic usage.

from streamlib import CountMin
cm = CountMin() # create a instance of CountMin, see document for more detail
cm.processBatch([0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 3, 3, 4])
for i in xrange(5):
    print 'Estimated frequency of', i, 'is', cm.estimate(i)

result of above code,:

Estimated frequency of 0 is 4
Estimated frequency of 1 is 6
Estimated frequency of 2 is 1
Estimated frequency of 3 is 2
Estimated frequency of 4 is 1

An instance of CountMin can be initialized by two parameters, see docs for detail.

Documents

Official Document.

Dependencies

• Python = 2.x (x >= 6).
• mmh3 >= 2.0

TODO

• Try to use CPython to speed up the implementation.
• Add more streaming algorithms.
• Minimize dependencies.

Bibliography

[ccfc04]

Charikar, Moses, Kevin Chen, and Martin Farach-Colton. "Finding frequent items in data streams." Automata, Languages and Programming. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002. 693-703.

[ams]

Alon, Noga, Yossi Matias, and Mario Szegedy. "The space complexity of approximating the frequency moments." Proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM, 1996.

[bjkst]

Bar-Yossef, Ziv, et al. "Counting distinct elements in a data stream." Randomization and Approximation Techniques in Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2002. 1-10.

[cm05]

(1, 2, 3) Cormode, Graham, and S. Muthukrishnan. "An improved data stream summary: the count-min sketch and its applications." Journal of Algorithms 55.1 (2005): 58-75.

[mg82]

Misra, Jayadev, and David Gries. "Finding repeated elements." Science of computer programming 2.2 (1982): 143-152.

[myblog]

http://jiecchen.github.io/blog/2014/08/13/quantile-sketch/

Maintainer

• Jiecao Chen (currently supported by NSF Grant CCF-1525024)

Other contributors

• Qin Zhang
• Rachel Lowden