Annotations in Data Streams

Abstract

The central goal of data stream algorithms is to process massive streams of data using sublinear storage space. Motivated by work in the database community on outsourcing database and data stream processing, we ask whether the space usage of such algorithms can be further reduced by enlisting a more powerful “helper” that can annotate the stream as it is read. We do not wish to blindly trust the helper, so we require that the algorithm be convinced of having computed a correct answer. We show upper bounds that achieve a nontrivial tradeoff between the amount of annotation used and the space required to verify it. We also prove lower bounds on such tradeoffs, often nearly matching the upper bounds, via notions related to Merlin-Arthur communication complexity. Our results cover the classic data stream problems of selection, frequency moments, and fundamental graph problems such as triangle-freeness and connectivity. Our work is also part of a growing trend—including recent studies of multipass streaming, read/write streams, and randomly ordered streams—of asking more complexity-theoretic questions about data stream processing. It is a recognition that, in addition to practical relevance, the data stream model raises many interesting theoretical questions in its own right.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Aug 25, 2014
Source ID
10.1145/2636924

Entities

People

  • Amit Chakrabarti
  • Andrew Mcgregor
  • Graham Cormode
  • Justin Thaler

Organizations

  • Dartmouth College
  • Division of Computing and Communication Foundations
  • Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
  • National Science Foundation
  • United States Department of Defense
  • University of California, Berkeley
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • University of Warwick

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Graph Algorithms and Convex Optimization.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Technology Areas

  • Space