AMS Without 4-Wise Independence on Product Domains

Abstract

In their seminal work, Alon, Matias, and Szegedy introduced several sketching techniques, including showing that $4$-wise independence is sufficient to obtain good approximations of the second frequency moment.  In this work, we show that their sketching technique can be extended to product domains $[n]^k$ by using the product of $4$-wise independent functions on $[n]$.

Our work extends that of Indyk and McGregor, who showed the result for $k = 2$.  Their primary motivation was the problem of identifying correlations in data streams. In their model, a stream of pairs $(i,j) \in [n]^2$ arrive, giving a joint distribution $(X,Y)$, and they find approximation algorithms for how close the joint distribution is to the product of the marginal distributions under various metrics, which naturally corresponds to how close $X$ and $Y$ are to being independent. By using our technique, we obtain a new result for the problem of approximating the $\ell_2$ distance between the joint distribution and the product of the marginal distributions for $k$-ary vectors, instead of just pairs, in a single pass. Our analysis gives a randomized algorithm that is a $(1\pm \epsilon)$ approximation (with probability $1-\delta$) that requires space logarithmic in $n$ and $m$ and proportional to $3^k$.