arXiv subjects

Jakob Bæk Tejs Houen

Publications and source records attributed to Jakob Bæk Tejs Houen.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Hashing for Sampling-Based Estimation

Hash-based sampling and estimation are common themes in computing. Using hashing for sampling gives us the coordination needed to compare samples from different sets. Hashing is also used when we want to count distinct elements. The quality of the estimator for, say, the Jaccard similarity between two sets, depends on the concentration of the number of sampled elements from their intersection. Often we want to compare one query set against many stored sets to find one of the most similar sets, so we need strong concentration and low error-probability. In this paper, we provide strong explicit concentration bounds for Tornado Tabulation hashing [Bercea, Beretta, Klausen, Houen, and Thorup, FOCS'23] which is a realistic constant time hashing scheme. Previous concentration bounds for fast hashing were off by orders of magnitude, in the sample size needed to guarantee the same concentration. The true power of our result appears when applied in the local uniformity framework by [Dahlgaard, Knudsen, Rotenberg, and Thorup, STOC'15].

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arXiv2024

Daisy Bloom Filters

A filter is a widely used data structure for storing an approximation of a given set $S$ of elements from some universe $U$ (a countable set).It represents a superset $S'\supseteq S$ that is ''close to $S$'' in the sense that for $x\not\in S$, the probability that $x\in S'$ is bounded by some $\varepsilon > 0$. The advantage of using a Bloom filter, when some false positives are acceptable, is that the space usage becomes smaller than what is required to store $S$ exactly. Though filters are well-understood from a worst-case perspective, it is clear that state-of-the-art constructions may not be close to optimal for particular distributions of data and queries. Suppose, for instance, that some elements are in $S$ with probability close to 1. Then it would make sense to always include them in $S'$, saving space by not having to represent these elements in the filter. Questions like this have been raised in the context of Weighted Bloom filters (Bruck, Gao and Jiang, ISIT 2006) and Bloom filter implementations that make use of access to learned components (Vaidya, Knorr, Mitzenmacher, and Krask, ICLR 2021). In this paper, we present a lower bound for the expected space that such a filter requires. We also show that the lower bound is asymptotically tight by exhibiting a filter construction that executes queries and insertions in worst-case constant time, and has a false positive rate at most $\varepsilon $ with high probability over input sets drawn from a product distribution. We also present a Bloom filter alternative, which we call the $\textit{Daisy Bloom filter}$, that executes operations faster and uses significantly less space than the standard Bloom filter.

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arXiv2024

Fast Similarity Sketching

We consider the $\textit{Similarity Sketching}$ problem: Given a universe $[u] = \{0,\ldots, u-1\}$ we want a random function $S$ mapping subsets $A\subseteq [u]$ into vectors $S(A)$ of size $t$, such that the Jaccard similarity $J(A,B) = |A\cap B|/|A\cup B|$ between sets $A$ and $B$ is preserved. More precisely, define $X_i = [S(A)[i] = S(B)[i]]$ and $X = \sum_{i\in [t]} X_i$. We want $E[X_i]=J(A,B)$, and we want $X$ to be strongly concentrated around $E[X] = t \cdot J(A,B)$ (i.e. Chernoff-style bounds). This is a fundamental problem which has found numerous applications in data mining, large-scale classification, computer vision, similarity search, etc. via the classic MinHash algorithm. The vectors $S(A)$ are also called $\textit{sketches}$. Strong concentration is critical, for often we want to sketch many sets $B_1,\ldots,B_n$ so that we later, for a query set $A$, can find (one of) the most similar $B_i$. It is then critical that no $B_i$ looks much more similar to $A$ due to errors in the sketch. The seminal $t\times\textit{MinHash}$ algorithm uses $t$ random hash functions $h_1,\ldots, h_t$, and stores $\left ( \min_{a\in A} h_1(A),\ldots, \min_{a\in A} h_t(A) \right )$ as the sketch of $A$. The main drawback of MinHash is, however, its $O(t\cdot |A|)$ running time, and finding a sketch with similar properties and faster running time has been the subject of several papers. (continued...)

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arXiv2023

Locally Uniform Hashing

Hashing is a common technique used in data processing, with a strong impact on the time and resources spent on computation. Hashing also affects the applicability of theoretical results that often assume access to (unrealistic) uniform/fully-random hash functions. In this paper, we are concerned with designing hash functions that are practical and come with strong theoretical guarantees on their performance. To this end, we present tornado tabulation hashing, which is simple, fast, and exhibits a certain full, local randomness property that provably makes diverse algorithms perform almost as if (abstract) fully-random hashing was used. For example, this includes classic linear probing, the widely used HyperLogLog algorithm of Flajolet, Fusy, Gandouet, Meunier [AOFA 97] for counting distinct elements, and the one-permutation hashing of Li, Owen, and Zhang [NIPS 12] for large-scale machine learning. We also provide a very efficient solution for the classical problem of obtaining fully-random hashing on a fixed (but unknown to the hash function) set of $n$ keys using $O(n)$ space. As a consequence, we get more efficient implementations of the splitting trick of Dietzfelbinger and Rink [ICALP'09] and the succinct space uniform hashing of Pagh and Pagh [SICOMP'08]. Tornado tabulation hashing is based on a simple method to systematically break dependencies in tabulation-based hashing techniques.

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arXiv2023

A Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform using Fast Hashing

The \emph{Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform} of Kane and Nelson (SODA 2012) provides a linear dimensionality-reducing map $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times u}$ in $\ell_2$ that preserves distances up to distortion of $1 + \varepsilon$ with probability $1 - δ$, where $m = O(\varepsilon^{-2} \log 1/δ)$ and each column of $A$ has $O(\varepsilon m)$ non-zero entries. The previous analyses of the Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform all assumed access to a $Ω(\log 1/δ)$-wise independent hash function. The main contribution of this paper is a more general analysis of the Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform with less assumptions on the hash function. We also show that the \emph{Mixed Tabulation hash function} of Dahlgaard, Knudsen, Rotenberg, and Thorup (FOCS 2015) satisfies the conditions of our analysis, thus giving us the first analysis of a Sparse Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform that works with a practical hash function.

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arXiv2022

Simple Set Sketching

Imagine handling collisions in a hash table by storing, in each cell, the bit-wise exclusive-or of the set of keys hashing there. This appears to be a terrible idea: For $αn$ keys and $n$ buckets, where $α$ is constant, we expect that a constant fraction of the keys will be unrecoverable due to collisions. We show that if this collision resolution strategy is repeated three times independently the situation reverses: If $α$ is below a threshold of $\approx 0.81$ then we can recover the set of all inserted keys in linear time with high probability. Even though the description of our data structure is simple, its analysis is nontrivial. Our approach can be seen as a variant of the Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF) of Eppstein and Goodrich. While IBFs involve an explicit checksum per bucket to decide whether the bucket stores a single key, we exploit the idea of quotienting, namely that some bits of the key are implicit in the location where it is stored. We let those serve as an implicit checksum. These bits are not quite enough to ensure that no errors occur and the main technical challenge is to show that decoding can recover from these errors.

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arXiv2022

Bias Reduction for Sum Estimation

In classical statistics and distribution testing, it is often assumed that elements can be sampled from some distribution $P$, and that when an element $x$ is sampled, the probability $P$ of sampling $x$ is also known. Recent work in distribution testing has shown that many algorithms are robust in the sense that they still produce correct output if the elements are drawn from any distribution $Q$ that is sufficiently close to $P$. This phenomenon raises interesting questions: under what conditions is a "noisy" distribution $Q$ sufficient, and what is the algorithmic cost of coping with this noise? We investigate these questions for the problem of estimating the sum of a multiset of $N$ real values $x_1, \ldots, x_N$. This problem is well-studied in the statistical literature in the case $P = Q$, where the Hansen-Hurwitz estimator is frequently used. We assume that for some known distribution $P$, values are sampled from a distribution $Q$ that is pointwise close to $P$. For every positive integer $k$ we define an estimator $ζ_k$ for $μ= \sum_i x_i$ whose bias is proportional to $γ^k$ (where our $ζ_1$ reduces to the classical Hansen-Hurwitz estimator). As a special case, we show that if $Q$ is pointwise $γ$-close to uniform and all $x_i \in \{0, 1\}$, for any $ε> 0$, we can estimate $μ$ to within additive error $εN$ using $m = Θ({N^{1-\frac{1}{k}} / ε^{2/k}})$ samples, where $k = \left\lceil (\log ε)/(\log γ)\right\rceil$. We show that this sample complexity is essentially optimal. Our bounds show that the sample complexity need not vary uniformly with the desired error parameter $ε$: for some values of $ε$, perturbations in its value have no asymptotic effect on the sample complexity, while for other values, any decrease in its value results in an asymptotically larger sample complexity.

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arXiv2022

Understanding the Moments of Tabulation Hashing via Chaoses

Simple tabulation hashing dates back to Zobrist in 1970 and is defined as follows: Each key is viewed as $c$ characters from some alphabet $Σ$, we have $c$ fully random hash functions $h_0, \ldots, h_{c - 1} \colon Σ\to \{0, \ldots, 2^l - 1\}$, and a key $x = (x_0, \ldots, x_{c - 1})$ is hashed to $h(x) = h_0(x_0) \oplus \ldots \oplus h_{c - 1}(x_{c - 1})$ where $\oplus$ is the bitwise XOR operation. The previous results on tabulation hashing by P{\v a}tra{\c s}cu and Thorup~[J.ACM'11] and by Aamand et al.~[STOC'20] focused on proving Chernoff-style tail bounds on hash-based sums, e.g., the number keys hashing to a given value, for simple tabulation hashing, but their bounds do not cover the entire tail. Chaoses are random variables of the form $\sum a_{i_0, \ldots, i_{c - 1}} X_{i_0} \cdot \ldots \cdot X_{i_{c - 1}}$ where $X_i$ are independent random variables. Chaoses are a well-studied concept from probability theory, and tight analysis has been proven in several instances, e.g., when the independent random variables are standard Gaussian variables and when the independent random variables have logarithmically convex tails. We notice that hash-based sums of simple tabulation hashing can be seen as a sum of chaoses that are not independent. This motivates us to use techniques from the theory of chaoses to analyze hash-based sums of simple tabulation hashing. In this paper, we obtain bounds for all the moments of hash-based sums for simple tabulation hashing which are tight up to constants depending only on $c$. In contrast with the previous attempts, our approach will mostly be analytical and does not employ intricate combinatorial arguments. The improved analysis of simple tabulation hashing allows us to obtain bounds for the moments of hash-based sums for the mixed tabulation hashing introduced by Dahlgaard et al.~[FOCS'15].

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