Improved Frequency Estimation Algorithms with and without Predictions
Anders Aamand Justin Y. Chen Huy Lê Nguyen Sandeep Silwal Ali Vakilian
Estimating frequencies of elements appearing in a data stream is a key task
in large-scale data analysis. Popular sketching approaches to this problem
(e.g., CountMin and CountSketch) come with worst-case guarantees that
probabilistically bound the error of the estimated frequencies for any possible
input. The work of Hsu et al. (2019) introduced the idea of using machine
learning to tailor sketching algorithms to the specific data distribution they
are being run on. In particular, their learning-augmented frequency estimation
algorithm uses a learned heavy-hitter oracle which predicts which elements will
appear many times in the stream. We give a novel algorithm, which in some
parameter regimes, already theoretically outperforms the learning based
algorithm of Hsu et al. without the use of any predictions. Augmenting our
algorithm with heavy-hitter predictions further reduces the error and improves
upon the state of the art. Empirically, our algorithms achieve superior
performance in all experiments compared to prior approaches.