In the data stream scenario, input arrives very rapidly and there is limited memory to store the input. Algorithms have to work with one or few passes over the data, space less than linear in the input size or time significantly less than the input size. In the past few years, a new theory has emerged for reasoning about algorithms that work within these constraints on space, time, and number of passes. Some of the methods rely on metric embeddings, pseudo-random computations, sparse approximation theory and communication complexity. The applications for this scenario include IP network traffic analysis, mining text message streams and processing massive data sets in general. Researchers in Theoretical Computer Science, Databases, IP Networking and Computer Systems are working on the data stream challenges. This article is an overview and survey of data stream algorithmics and is an updated version of [175].1

The k-means method is a widely used clustering technique that seeks to minimize the average squared distance between points in the same cluster. Although it offers no accuracy guarantees, its simplicity and speed are very appealing in practice. By augmenting k-means with a very simple, randomized seeding technique, we obtain an algorithm that is Θ(log k)-competitive with the optimal clustering. Preliminary experiments show that our augmentation improves both the speed and the accuracy of k-means, often quite dramatically. 1

Motivated by applications such as document and image classification in information retrieval, we consider the problem of clustering dynamic point sets in a metric space. We propose a model called incremental clustering which is based on a careful analysis of the requirements of the information retrieval application, and which should also be useful in other applications. The goal is to efficiently maintain clusters of small diameter as new points are inserted. We analyze several natural greedy algorithms and demonstrate that they perform poorly. We propose new deterministic and randomized incremental clustering algorithms which have a provably good performance. We complement our positive results with lower bounds on the performance of incremental algorithms. Finally, we consider the dual clustering problem where the clusters are of fixed diameter, and the goal is to minimize the number of clusters.

Traditional databases store sets of relatively static records with no pre-defined notion of time, unless timestamp attributes are explicitly added. While this model adequately represents commercial catalogues or repositories of personal information, many current and emerging applications require support for online analysis of rapidly changing data streams. Limitations of traditional DBMSs in supporting streaming applications have been recognized, prompting research to augment existing technologies and build new systems to manage streaming data. The purpose of this paper is to review recent work in data stream management systems, with an emphasis on application requirements, data models, continuous query languages, and query evaluation.

The sliding window model is useful for discounting stale data in data stream applications. In this model, data elements arrive continually and only the most recent N elements are used when answering queries. We present a novel technique for solving two important and related problems in the sliding window model --- maintaining variance and maintaining a k-- median clustering. Our solution to the problem of maintaining variance provides a continually updated estimate of the variance of the last N values in a data stream with relative error of at most # using O( # 2 log N) memory. We present a constant-factor approximation algorithm which maintains an approximate k--median solution for the last N data points using O( N) memory, where # < 1/2 is a parameter which trades o# the space bound with the approximation factor of O(2 ).

Clustering is an important task in mining evolving data streams. Beside the limited memory and one-pass constraints, the nature of evolving data streams implies the following requirements for stream clustering: no assumption on the number of clusters, discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape and ability to handle outliers. While a lot of clustering algorithms for data streams have been proposed, they offer no solution to the combination of these requirements. In this paper, we present DenStream, a new approach for discovering clusters in an evolving data stream. The “dense ” micro-cluster (named core-micro-cluster) is introduced to summarize the clusters with arbitrary shape, while the potential core-micro-cluster and outlier micro-cluster structures are proposed to maintain and distinguish the potential clusters and outliers. A novel pruning strategy is designed based on these concepts, which guarantees the precision of the weights of the micro-clusters with limited memory. Our performance study over a number of real and synthetic data sets demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.

In this paper, we show the existence of small coresets for the problems of computing k-median and k-means clustering for points in low dimension. In other words, we show that given a point set P in IR , one can compute a weighted set S P , of size log n), such that one can compute the k-median/means clustering on S instead of on P , and get an (1 + ")-approximation.

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A dynamic geometric data stream consists of a sequence of m insert/delete operations of points from the discrete space {1,..., ∆} d [26]. We develop streaming (1 + ɛ)-approximation algorithms for k-median, k-means, MaxCut, maximum weighted matching (MaxWM), maximum travelling salesperson (MaxTSP), maximum spanning tree (MaxST), and average distance over dynamic geometric data streams. Our algorithms maintain a small weighted set of points (a coreset) that approximates with probability 2/3 the current point set with respect to the considered problem during the m insert/delete operations of the data stream. They use poly(ɛ −1, log m, log ∆) space and update time per insert/delete operation for constant k and dimension d. Having a coreset one only needs a fast approximation algorithm for the weighted problem to compute a solution quickly. In fact, even an exponential algorithm is sometimes feasible as its running time may still be polynomial in n. For example one can compute in poly(log n, exp(O((1+log(1/ɛ)/ɛ) d−1))) time a solution to k-median and k-means [21] where n is the size of the current point set and k and d are constants. Finding an implicit solution to MaxCut can be done in poly(log n, exp((1/ɛ) O(1))) time. For MaxST and average distance we require poly(log n, ɛ −1) time and for MaxWM we require O(n 3) time to do this.