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Min-Hash Sketches

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Algorithms

  • 354 Accesses

Years and Authors of Summarized Original Work

  • 1985; Flajolet, Martin

  • 1997; Broder

  • 1997; Cohen

Problem Definition

MinHash sketches (also known as min-wise sketches) are randomized summary structures of subsets which support set union operations and approximate processing of cardinality and similarity queries.

Set-union support, also called mergeability, means that a sketch of the union of two sets can be computed from the sketches of the two sets. In particular, this applies when the second set is a single element. The queries supported by MinHash sketches include cardinality (of a subset from its sketch) and similarity (of two subsets from their sketches).

Sketches are useful for massive data analysis. Working with sketches often means that instead of explicitly maintaining and manipulating very large subsets (or equivalently 0/1 vectors), we can instead maintain the much smaller sketches and can still query properties of these subsets.

We denote the universe of elements by Uand its...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, Israel

    Edith Cohen

  2. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Edith Cohen

Authors
  1. Edith Cohen
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Ming-Yang Kao

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Cohen, E. (2016). Min-Hash Sketches. In: Kao, MY. (eds) Encyclopedia of Algorithms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2864-4_573

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