On Frequency Estimation and Detection of Frequent Items in Time Faded Streams

We deal with the problem of detecting frequent items in a stream under the constraint that items are weighted, and recent items must be weighted more than older ones. This kind of problem naturally arises in a wide class of applications in which recent data is considered more useful and valuable with regard to older, stale data. The weight assigned to an item is therefore a function of its arrival timestamp. As a consequence, whilst in traditional frequent item mining applications we need to estimate frequency counts, we are instead required to estimate decayed counts. These applications are said to work in the time fading model. Two sketch-based algorithms for processing time-decayed streams have been recently published independently near the end of 2016. The FSSQ algorithm, besides a sketch, also uses an additional data structure called Quasi-Heap to maintain frequent items. FDCMSS, our algorithm, cleverly combines key ideas borrowed from forward decay, the Count-Min sketch and the Space Saving algorithm. Therefore, it makes sense to compare and contrast the two algorithms in order to fully understand their strengths and weaknesses. We show, through extensive experimental results, that FSSQ is better for detecting frequent items than for frequency estimation. The use of the Quasi-Heap data structure slows down the algorithm owing to the huge number of maintenance operations. Therefore, FSSQ may not be able to cope with high-speed data streams. FDCMSS is better suitable for frequency estimation; moreover, it is extremely fast and can be used in the context of high-speed data streams and for the detection of frequent items as well, since its recall is always greater than 99%, even when using an extremely tiny amount of space. Therefore, FDCMSS proves to be an overall good choice when considering jointly the recall, precision, average relative error and the speed.