Feature-preserved sampling over streaming data

In this article, we explore a novel sampling model, called feature preserved sampling (FPS) that sequentially generates a high-quality sample over sliding windows. The sampling quality we consider refers to the degree of consistency between the sample proportion and the population proportion of each attribute value in a window. Due to the time-variant nature of real-world datasets, users are more likely to be interested in the most recent data. However, previous works have not been able to generate a high-quality sample over sliding windows that precisely preserves up-to-date population characteristics. Motivated by this shortcoming, we have developed the FPS algorithm, which has several advantages: (1) it sequentially generates a sample from a time-variant data source over sliding windows; (2) the execution time of FPS is linear with respect to the database size; (3) the relative proportional differences between the sample proportions and population proportions of most distinct attribute values are guaranteed to be below a specified error threshold, ε, while the relative proportion differences of the remaining attribute values are as close to ε as possible, which ensures that the generated sample is of high quality; (4) the sample rate is close to the user specified rate so that a high quality sampling result can be obtained without increasing the sample size; (5) by a thorough analytical and empirical study, we prove that FPS has acceptable space overheads, especially when the attribute values have Zipfian distributions, and FPS can also excellently preserve the population proportion of multivariate features in the sample; and (6) FPS can be applied to infinite streams and finite datasets equally, and the generated samples can be used for various applications. Our experiments on both real and synthetic data validate that FPS can effectively obtain a high quality sample of the desired size. In addition, while using the sample generated by FPS in various mining applications, a significant improvement in efficiency can be achieved without compromising the model's precision.