Synonyms
Synopsis
Definition
A synopsis structure for a dataset S is any summary of S whose size is substantively smaller than S. Formally, its size is at most O(|S|ε), where |S| is the size (in bytes) of S, for some constant ε < 1.
Key Points
Synopsis structures are small, often statistical summaries of a data set. The term serves as an umbrella for any summarization structure of sufficiently small size, such as random samples, histograms, wavelets, sketches, top-k summaries, etc.
Synopsis structures are most commonly used in conjunction with data streams. The goal is to construct, in one pass over the data stream, a synopsis structure that can be used to answer any query from a prespecified class of queries. That is, at any point, a user may pose a query Q on the data stream thus far, and a (typically approximate) answer to Qmust be produced using only the current synopsis structure. Two key advantages of using a synopsis structure to answer queries are that the space overhead is...
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Gibbons PB, Matias Y. Synopsis data structures for massive data sets. DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science: External Memory Algorithms. 1999.
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Gibbons, P.B. (2018). Synopsis Structure. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_383
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_383
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