Approximate Data Structures with Applications

Abstract Yossi Matias Je rey Scott Vitter y Neal E. Young z In this paper we introduce the notion of approximate data structures, in which a small amount of error is tolerated in the output. Approximate data structures trade error of approximation for faster operation, leading to theoretical and practical speedups for a wide variety of algorithms. We give approximatevariants of the van Emde Boas data structure, which support the same dynamic operations as the standard van Emde Boas data structure 28, 20 , except that answers to queries are approximate. The variants support all operations in constant time provided the error of approximation is 1=polylogn, and in Ologlogn time provided the error is 1=polynomialn, for n elements in the data structure. We consider the tolerance of prototypical algorithms to approximate data structures. We study in particularPrim'sminimumspanningtree algorithm,Dijkstra's single-source shortest paths algorithm, and an on-line variant of Graham�...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: SODA
• Authors: Yossi Matias, Jeffrey Scott Vitter, Neal E. Young
• Keywords: Algorithms, Approximate Data Structures, Boas Data Structure, Data Structures, SODA 1994