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Data Sampling

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Definition

Repeatedly choosing random numbers according to a given distribution is generally referred to as sampling. It is a popular technique for data reduction and approximate query processing. It allows a large set of data to be summarized as a much smaller data set, the sampling synopsis, which usually provides an estimate of the original data with provable error guarantees. One advantage of the sampling synopsis is easy and efficient. The cost of constructing such a synopsis is only proportional to the synopsis size, which makes the sampling complexity potentially sublinear to the size of the original data. The other advantage is that the sampling synopsis represents parts of the original data. Thus many query processing and data manipulation techniques that are applicable to the original data, can be directly applied on the synopsis.

Historical Background

The notion of representing large data sets through small samples dates back to the end of nineteenth century and has led to...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Aggarwal C.C. On biased reservoir sampling in the presence of stream evolution. In Proc. 32nd Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases, 2006.

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  4. Gibbons P.B. and Matias Y. 1New sampling-based summary statistics for improving approximate query answers. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD int. conf. on Management of Data, 1998.

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  5. Kish L. Survey Sampling. Wiley, New York, 643, 1965.xvi,

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  6. Speegle G.D. and Donahoo M.J. Using statistical sampling for query optimization in heterogeneous library information systems. In Proc. 20th ACM Annual Conference on Computer Science, 1993.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Australian e-health Research Center, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Qing Zhang

Authors
  1. Qing Zhang
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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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Zhang, Q. (2009). Data 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_535

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