On Efficient Top-k Empirical Variance Computation: A Once-For-All Progressive Sampling Approach
摘要
The empirical variance estimation and its corresponding top-k query is a fundamental problem in the data mining and data analytics and serves as an inherent building block for many clustering and feature selection algorithms. Since the exact computation requires scanning the whole dataset which will be prohibitively expensive for many real-time applications, all existing studies in the literature are dedicated to find the approximate solutions by using the sampling techniques. For the top-k query processing, we observe that all existing studies analyze the error of the estimated variance of each selected attribute independently by using the traditional centrality inequality (e.g., Chernoff bounds/Hoeffding’s inequality) and then adopt the traditional union bound to estimate the aggregate error of the k selected attributes. As such, the bound is significantly loose and renders their algorithm sensitive to the parameter k. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a once-for-all progressive sampling algorithm, namely Top-k