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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Learned Interpolation for Better Streaming Quantiles with Worst Case Guarantees

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

An ε-approximate quantile sketch over a stream of n inputs approximates the rank of any query point q—that is, the number of input points less than q—up to an additive error of εn, generally with some probability of at least 1−1/ poly(n), while consuming o(n) space. While the celebrated KLL sketch of Karnin, Lang, and Liberty achieves a provably optimal quantile approximation algorithm over worst-case streams, the approximations it achieves in practice are often far from optimal. Indeed, the most commonly used technique in practice is Dunning’s t-digest, which often achieves much better approximations than KLL on real-world data but is known to have arbitrarily large errors in the worst case. We apply interpolation techniques to the streaming quantiles problem to attempt to achieve better approximations on real-world data sets than KLL while maintaining similar guarantees in the worst case.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2022

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Schiefer, Nicholas
Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
  • Indyk, Piotr

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147533
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/147533

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Schiefer, Nicholas. Learned Interpolation for Better Streaming Quantiles with Worst Case Guarantees. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/147533