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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 2838–2842Cite as

Stream Sampling

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Definition

Stream sampling is the process of collecting a representative sample of the elements of a data stream. The sample is usually much smaller than the entire stream, but can be designed to retain many important characteristics of the stream, and can be used to estimate many important aggregates on the stream. Unlike sampling from a stored data set, stream sampling must be performed online, when the data arrives. Any element that is not stored within the sample is lost forever, and cannot be retrieved. This article discusses various methods of sampling from a data stream and applications of these methods.

Historical Background

An early algorithm to maintain a random sample of a data stream is the reservoir sampling algorithm due to Vitter [15]. More recent random sampling based algorithms have been inspired by the work of Alon et al. [1]. Random sampling has for a long time been used to process data within stored databases – the reader is referred to [13] for a survey.

Foundations

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Recommended Reading

  1. Alon N., Matias Y., and Szegedy M. The space complexity of approximating the frequency moments. J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 58(1):137–147, 1999.

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  2. Babcock B., Datar M., and Motwani R. Sampling from a moving window over streaming data. In Proc. ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms, 2002, pp. 633–634.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

    Bibudh Lahiri & Srikanta Tirthapura

Authors
  1. Bibudh Lahiri
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  2. Srikanta Tirthapura
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Lahiri, B., Tirthapura, S. (2009). Stream Sampling. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_372

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