A One-Pass Algorithm for Accurately Estimating Quantiles for Disk-Resident Data.

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/vldb/AlsabtiRS97,
  author    = {Khaled Alsabti and
               Sanjay Ranka and
               Vineet Singh},
  editor    = {Matthias Jarke and
               Michael J. Carey and
               Klaus R. Dittrich and
               Frederick H. Lochovsky and
               Pericles Loucopoulos and
               Manfred A. Jeusfeld},
  title     = {A One-Pass Algorithm for Accurately Estimating Quantiles for
               Disk-Resident Data},
  booktitle = {VLDB'97, Proceedings of 23rd International Conference on Very
               Large Data Bases, August 25-29, 1997, Athens, Greece},
  publisher = {Morgan Kaufmann},
  year      = {1997},
  isbn      = {1-55860-470-7},
  pages     = {346-355},
  ee        = {db/conf/vldb/AlsabtiRS97.html},
  crossref  = {DBLP:conf/vldb/97},
  bibsource = {DBLP, http://dblp.uni-trier.de}
}

Abstract

The phi-quantile of an ordered sequence of data values is the element with rank phi*n, where n is the total number of values. Accurate estimates of quantiles are required for the solution of many practical problems. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for estimating the quantile values for disk-resident data. Our algorithm has the following characteristics: (1) It requires only one pass over the data; (2) It is deterministic; (3) It produces good lower and upper bounds of the true values of the quantiles; (4) It requires no a priori knowledge of the distribution of the data set; (5) It has a scalable parallel formulation; (6) Extra time and memory for computing additional quantiles (beyond the first one) are constant per quantile.

We present experimental results on the IBM SP-2. The experimental results show that the algorithm is indeed robust and does not depend on the distribution of the data sets.

Copyright © 1997 by the VLDB Endowment. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the VLDB copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by the permission of the Very Large Data Base Endowment. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or special permission from the Endowment.

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