## Probabilistic Counting

I recently got my hands on the common-crawl URL dataset from here and wanted to compute some stats like the number of unique domains contained in the corpus. This was the perfect opportunity to whip up a script that implemented Durande et. al’s log-log paper.

The algorithm operates on a stream and produces an estimate for the cardinality of the input stream. Here’s the algorithm itself:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 (ns probabilistic-counting.log-log "The LogLog algorithnm" (:use [incanter.core]) (:import [org.apache.mahout.math MurmurHash] [org.apache.commons.lang3 SerializationUtils])) (defn rho "Number of leading zeros in the bit-representation Args: y : the number itself size : optional : the number of bytes used to represent the number. Default: 4 bytes/32 bits" ([y] (rho y 32)) ([y size] (int (- size (Math/ceil (/ (Math/log (+ y 1)) (Math/log 2))))))) (defn alpha [m] (if (< 64 m) 0.79402 (* 2 (Math/pow (* (gamma (- (/ 1 m))) (/ (- 1 (Math/pow 2 (/ 1 m))) (Math/log 2))) (- m))))) (defn log-log [xs k] (let [m (int (Math/pow 2 k)) buckets (make-array Integer/TYPE m)] (do (map #(aset buckets % 0) (range m)) (doseq [x xs] (let [h (int (MurmurHash/hash (SerializationUtils/serialize x) 1991)) idx (bit-and h (- m 1)) val (max (aget buckets idx) (rho h))] (aset buckets idx val))) (* (Math/pow 2 (/ (apply + buckets) m)) m (alpha m))))) 

And here’s a test (actual cardinality = 1,000,000):

 1 2 3 (defn demo-log-log [] (log-log (map #(mod % 1000000) (range 10000000)) 10)) 

When run, we get:

user> (demo-log-log)
1023513.5806580923

which is an error of 2.3%.

Now, let us deploy it on the URL dataset. There are 2,412,755,840 URLs in the format: host_reversed/path/scheme. The following piece of code constructs the host stream and estimates the cardinality.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 (ns probabilistic-counting.demo-urls "Estimate the number of unique domains in the Common crawl dataset" (:use [probabilistic-counting.log-log])) (defn urls-stream [url-file] (-> url-file clojure.java.io/reader line-seq)) (defn hosts-stream [url-stream] (map #(first (clojure.string/split % #"/")) url-stream)) (defn count-hosts [a-hosts-stream] (log-log a-hosts-stream 10)) (defn -main [& args] (let [path (first args) num-urls (when (second args) (-> args second Integer/parseInt))] (if num-urls (->> path urls-stream hosts-stream (take num-urls) count-hosts) (->> path urls-stream hosts-stream count-hosts)))) 

On a portion of the dataset, these are the results:

Using standard unix tools (uniq works here without a sort because the dataset is already sorted by hostname):

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ cat ~/common_crawl_index_urls | head -n 50000 | cut -d "/" -f 1 | uniq | wc -l
9205

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ cat ~/common_crawl_index_urls | head -n 500000 | cut -d "/" -f 1 | uniq | wc -l
22164

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ cat ~/common_crawl_index_urls | head -n 5000000 | cut -d "/" -f 1 | uniq | wc -l
196318

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ cat ~/common_crawl_index_urls | head -n 50000000 | cut -d "/" -f 1 | uniq | wc -l
1525445

And log-log produces:

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ lein trampoline run ~/common_crawl_index_urls 50000
9677.974613035705

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ lein trampoline run ~/common_crawl_index_urls 500000
22708.710878857888

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ lein trampoline run ~/common_crawl_index_urls 5000000
194919.74158794453

➜  probabilistic_counting git:(master) ✗ lein trampoline run ~/common_crawl_index_urls 5000000
1602155.9911824786

And the accuracy is really very good.

This algorithm works since:

• $\rho(x)$ computes the position of the LSB in $x$.
• The probability that $\rho(x)$ is $k$ is $\frac{1}{2^k}$ (the probability of obtaining a sequence of $k – 1$ zeroes and a one).
• Say, the real cardinality is $n$. Thus, on $\frac{n}{2^k}$ members of this set, $\rho(x)$ will yield a value of $k$.
• As a result, if you can drive $2^k$ as close to $n$ as possible, you have a good estimation of cardinality. This is achieved by maximizing $k$.
• And thus, $\arg\max_{x \in M} \rho(x)$ is an estimator (albeit biased) for $\log(n)$.

This is one of those extremely sweet papers where the idea (minus the details) fits on a business card and the resulting algorithm has immense practical value.

The full source code is available in this github repository.

Soli Deo Gloria

Technologies Used:

(c) Shriphani Palakodety 2013-2014