# Tag Info

36

The traditional analysis is fine. The "traditional" analysis is, if it is explained correctly, an approximation; it's based on calculating the expected number of cells that are 0/1 when you hash the keys into the filter, and then analyzing as though that was the actual number. The point is that the number of cells that are 0 (or 1) are tightly ...

32

Here's a lower bound from sorting. Given an input set $S$ of length $n$ to be sorted, create an input to your running median problem consisting of $n-1$ copies of a number smaller than the minimum of $S$, then $S$ itself, then $n-1$ copies of a number larger than the maximum of $S$, and set $k=2n-1$. The running medians of this input are the same as the ...

31

You're describing the classical Bentley-Saxe logarithmic method, applied to static sorted arrays. The same idea can be used to add support for insertions to any static data structure (no insertions or deletions) for any decomposable searching problem. (A search problem is decomposable if the answer for any union $A\cup B$ can be computed easily from the ...

30

Here's a proof that it's impossible. Suppose you could build such a data structure. Build it. Then choose $n/\log n$ items at random from the list, add $\epsilon$ to each of them, where $\epsilon$ is smaller than the difference between any two items on the list, and perform the queries to check whether any of the resulting items is in the list. You've ...

24

I believe here is a different proof, proving the impossibility of an $\mathcal{O}(\log ^k n)$ query time structure, with $\mathcal{O}(n)$ pre-processing. Suppose in the preprocessing you do $\mathcal{O}(n)$ comparisons, leading to a partial order. Now consider the size $A$ of the largest antichain in that. Since these elements are not comparable, for us to ...

24

In ArXiv:1002.4248, John Iacono and Özgür Özkan describe a relatively simple algorithm to merge two binary search trees in $O(\log^2 n)$ amortized time; the analysis is the hard part. [Update: As Joe correctly observes in his answer, this algorithm is due to Brown and Tarjan.] They also describe a more complicated dictionary data structure, based on biased ...

23

The cells in a $kD$-tree can have high aspect ratio, whereas octree cells are guaranteed to be cubical. Since this is a theory board, I'll give you the theoretical reason why high aspect ratio is a problem: it makes it impossible to use volume bounds to control the number of cells that you have to examine when solving approximate nearest neighbor queries. ...

20

The answer to this question is "no". To see why, we can think about a very extreme case, and how a regular bloom filter would work vs. a theoretical "Bizzaro World" bloom filter, which we can call a "gloom filter". What is great about a bloom filter is that you can do one-sided tests for membership of items (with false positives) using a data structure that ...

17

There is a randomized linear expected time algorithm by Rabin; see e.g. Rabin Flips a Coin on Lipton's blog.

17

This is almost certainly impossible. Suppose you could solve your problem with preprocessing time $P(n)$ and query time $Q(n)$. Then there is a simple algorithm to solve the 3SUM problem—Given a set of $n$ real numbers, do any three elements sum to zero?—in $P(n)+n\cdot Q(n)$ time. We pre-process all the numbers, then for each number $a_k$, we find the ...

16

Consider the special case where you just want to determine if your query vector is orthogonal to some vector in your preprocessed collection. (That is, you want to determine if $\min_i \langle x, v_i \rangle = 0$, where the vectors under discussion have non-negative coefficients.) This case is already very interesting. Suppose you can answer queries in $n^{... 16 There is not a canonical such category, for the same reason there is no canonical category of computations. However, there are large and useful algebraic structures on data structures. One of the more general such structures, which is still nevertheless useful, is the theory of combinatorial species. A species is a functor$F : B \to B$, where$B$is the ... 16 You're right to think of hash functions in terms of "random bits produced". So if you have a hash function that produces a 64 bit hash, you can treat is as 4 16-bit hashes (by splitting), and so on. For the scheme described above (which should be attributed to Dillinger and Manolios; Kirsch/Mitzenmacher just analyzed it), that means you're correct; if ... 16 The communication complexity of the set disjointness problem is$\Omega(n)$. The communication complexity is a lower bound on the time complexity of testing whether the two instances are disjoint. Imagine Alice stores the data structure for the first set, and Bob stores the data structure for the second set; since they'll have to communicate$\Omega(n)$... 15 A group of friends and I are working on a space-RTS game as a fun side project. We're using a lot of the stuff we've learned at Computer Science to make it highly efficient, enabling us to make massive armies later on. For this purpose we've considered using kd-trees, but we quickly dismissed them: insertions and deletions are extremely common in our ... 15 I have not thought this through very much, so please correct me if I am wrong. Say$w$is the width of the poset. For the poset which is the union of$w$disjoint chains you need at least$w\log n$evaluations of$P$by just applying the standard lower bound on the query complexity of binary search to each chain. Since you give comparisons for free, you ... 14 Indeed, there is a different notion than isomorphism which is more useful in programming. It is called "behavioural equivalence" (sometimes called "observational equivalence") and it is established by giving a "simulation relation" between data structures rather than bijections. Algebraists came in and established an area called "algebraic data types" in ... 14 I wish I had a good answer for you. I use Book:Fundamental Data Structures (a collection of relevant Wikipedia articles) for my course on this subject but it's not really a complete textbook (for one thing, it has no exercises). CLRS is, I think, at a good level of detail for this sort of class but is missing too many of the important structures. 14 Probably not the best answer, but perhaps this is a useful starting point. If we wish to represent a non-negative integer, we can store it as a set of residues modulo sequential prime numbers starting from 2. In this form comparison is potentially hard, but multiplication and addition can be done pretty quickly. The product of the first$n$primes is ... 14 Your problem is known in the learning literature as "learning monotone functions using membership queries". A class of monotone functions for which one can identify all minterms is known as "polynomially learnable using membership queries". It seems that the existence of a polynomial time algorithm is still open. Schmulevich et al. prove that "Almost all ... 13 Moore's O(n) Majority voting algorithm is like a magic-trick! 13 A zipper, in general, is a data structure with a hole in it. Zippers are used for traversing/manipulating data structures, and the hole corresponds to the current focus of the traversal. Typically there is also an element of the data structure under consideration, so that one has a (list) zipper and a list or a (tree) zipper and a tree. The zipper allows the ... 13 No, this is not new; range searching with multilevel B-trees is completely standard. See, for example, the following surveys: Lars Arge. External memory data structures. Handbook of Massive Data Sets (James Abello, Panos M. Pardalos, and Mauricio G. C. Resende, eds.), 313-357. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. See especially sections 5 and 6. Jeffrey ... 13 How to come up with sum-of-logs potential Let's consider the BST algorithm$A$that for each access for element$x$, it rearranges only elements in the search path$P$of$x$called before-path, into some tree called after-tree. For any element$a$, let$s(a)$and$s'(a)$be the size of subtree rooted at$a$before and after the rearrangement respectively. ... 13 There's a matching lower bound in the cell probe model (with a logarithmic number of bits per memory cell); see Fredman and Saks, "The cell probe complexity of dynamic data structures", STOC 1989. 12 It is impossible to solve the problem in less than$cn\log n$time in standard models, e.g. using algebraic decision trees. This follows from the work of Yao and Ben-Or that shows that in this model it is not possible to decide if a set of$n$input numbers are all different or not (see http://people.bath.ac.uk/masnnv/Teaching/AAlg11_8.pdf). In case of your ... 12 I assume that you are interested in succinct external memory data structures that are efficient in practice. In that case, you can probably get what you want with a few basic techniques and some engineering. For trees, I would start with reading Arroyuelo et al.: Succinct Trees in Practice. The paper deals with trees in main memory, but most of the ... 12 There isn't really a single formalization of the kind of thing you are asking. There are many, many aspects to truth, trust, lies, and fallible reasoning, and this leads to an enormous variety of logical formalisms, each handling different aspects of this problem. If you want to account for uncertainty about your hypotheses, the traditional route is via ... 12 Let me add to Michael's answer that for split Bloom filters, where the hash functions have disjoint ranges, the traditional analysis is indeed correct without approximation or any concentration bounds. This is because the error probabilities for different hash functions become independent rather than correlated. The space/error trade-off for split Bloom ... 12 Let$A_k$be the inverse of$\alpha_k$.$A_1(x) = 2x, A_2(x) = 2^x, \dots$. I claim that$k^{-1}(x) = A_x(x)$. Since$x = \alpha_x(A_x(x))$, and since$\forall z, \alpha_y(z) > \alpha_x(z)$,$\alpha_y(A_x(x)) > \alpha_x(A_x(x)) = x$. As a result$k(A_x(x)) = x$. Now consider the value of$\alpha(k^{-1}(n)) = \alpha(A_n(n))$. By definition of$\alpha\$,...

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