Hokusai - Sketching Streams in Real Time

Abstract

We describe Hokusai, a real time system which is able to capture frequency information for streams of arbitrary sequences of symbols. The algorithm uses the CountMin sketch as its basis and exploits the fact that sketching is linear. It provides real time statistics of arbitrary events, e.g. streams of queries as a function of time. We use a factorizing approximation to provide point estimates at arbitrary (time, item) combinations. Queries can be answered in constant time.