Pakket: libstatistics-topk-perl (0.02-2)

implementation of the top-k streaming algorithm

The Statistics::TopK module implements the top-k streaming algorithm, also know as the "heavy hitters" algorithm. It is designed to process data streams and probabilistally calculate the k most frequent items while using limited memory.

A typical example would be to determine the top 10 IP addresses listed in an access log. A simple solution would be to hash each IP address to a counter and then sort the resulting hash by the counter size. But the hash could theoretically require over 4 billion keys.

The top-k algorithm only requires storage space proportional to the number of items of interest. It accomplishes this by sacrificing precision, as it is only a probabilistic counter.

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