Maintaining Stream Statistics over Sliding Windows

Abstract

We consider the problem of maintaining aggregates and statistics over data streams, with respect to the last N data elements seen so far. We refer to this model as the sliding window model. We consider the following basic problem: Given a stream of bits, maintain a count of the number of 1's in the last N elements seen from the stream. We show that, using $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon} \log^2 N)$ bits of memory, we can estimate the number of 1's to within a factor of $1 + \epsilon$. We also give a matching lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log^2 N)$ memory bits for any deterministic or randomized algorithms. We extend our scheme to maintain the sum of the last N positive integers and provide matching upper and lower bounds for this more general problem as well. We also show how to efficiently compute the Lp norms ($p \in [1,2]$) of vectors in the sliding window model using our techniques. Using our algorithm, one can adapt many other techniques to work for the sliding window model with a multiplicative overhead of $O(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log N)$ in memory and a $1 +\epsilon$ factor loss in accuracy. These include maintaining approximate histograms, hash tables, and statistics or aggregates such as sum and averages.