Recursive Sketching For Frequency Moments

Understand

In a ground-breaking paper, Indyk and Woodruff (STOC 05) showed how to compute $F_k$ (for $k>2$) in space complexity $O(\mbox{\em poly-log}(n,m)\cdot n^{1-\frac2k})$, which is optimal up to (large) poly-logarithmic factors in $n$ and $m$, where $m$ is the length of the stream and $n$ is the upper bound on the number of distinct elements in a stream.

• The best known lower bound for large moments is $\Omega(\log(n)n^{1-\frac2k})$.
• A follow-up work of Bhuvanagiri, Ganguly, Kesh and Saha (SODA 2006) reduced the poly-logarithmic factors of Indyk and Woodruff to $O(\log^2(m)\cdot (\log n+ \log m)\cdot n^{1-{2\over k}})$.
• Further reduction of poly-log factors has been an elusive goal since 2006, when Indyk and Woodruff method seemed to hit a natural "barrier." Using our simple recursive sketch, we provide a different yet simple approach to obtain a $O(\log(m)\log(nm)\cdot (\log\log n)^4\cdot n^{1-{2\over k}})$ algorithm for constant $\epsilon$ (our bound is, in fact, somewhat stronger, where the $(\log\log n)$ term can be replaced by any constant number of $\log $ iterations instead of just two or three, thus approaching $log^*n$.