The Stair Sketch: Bringing more Clarity to Memorize Recent Events
Yikai Zhao, Yubo Zhang, Pu Yi, Tong Yang, Bin Cui, Steve Uhlig · 2022 IEEE 38th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) · 2022
Data stream processing has become fundamental in computer science, with a wide range of applications, such as in databases, data mining, and security. Memorizing when an item appears in the data stream is one important task in stream processing. Because the older data is, the less value it has, memorizing recent events with higher accuracy is desirable. To achieve this, we propose a novel data stream processing structure named the Stair sketch. Our key idea is to organize the memory used by different time periods in the shape of stairs. We deploy the Stair sketch on Bloom filters, CM sketches, and CU sketches as case studies. Experiment results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by more than 5× in accuracy while providing comparable efficiency. The source code of the Stair sketch is available at GitHub.