mtm_stats 0.3.3.0

Highly efficient set statistics about many-to-many relationships

mtm_stats
Highly efficient set statistics about many-to-many relationships


This module computes statistics (counts) in the common case where two sets
(A and B) have a many-to-many relationship. Specifically, it computes:

* *connection count* (or just *count*): the number of connections a member of A has to B
* *intersection count*: the number of connections to B that two members of A share in common

This module aims to compute these for every possible combination of
members in A as fast as possible and without approximation.

The input for this module is a list of A/B pairs, i.e.:
[(a1, b1), (a1, b2), (a2, b2), ...]

If N_A is the length of A, the connection count will have size N_A and
the intersection count will have size N_A * (N_A - 1) / 2.

Any other set property can be easily derived from these.

* union_count(A1, A2) = count(A1) + count(A2) - intersection_count(A1, A2)
* single_sided_difference_count(A1, A2) = count(A1) - intersection(A1, A2)
* symmetric_difference_count(A1, A2) = union_count(A1, A2) - intersection_count(A1, A2)

The union is actually computed in the main "mtm_stats" function in "get_dicts_from_array_outputs"

This approach will be the most effective when the connections between A and B are sparse.

In addition, there is one optional approximation that can be used to enhance performance:
a cutoff filter for small intersections (default is 0).
If cutoff > 0, any result with intersection count <= cutoff will be approximated as 0.
The union count is then assumed to be count(A1) + count(A2).

Implementation details:
This module uses a combination of techniques to achieve this goal:
* Core implemented in C and Cython
* Bit packing (members of B are each assigned one bit)
* A sparse block array compression scheme that ignores large blocks of zeros in the bit-packed sets
* Efficiently applied bit operations (&, |, popcount)
* Only storing nonzero intersections using a 2-index sparse array: [(A1, A2, intersection_count), ...]
* The optional cutoff described above

These techniques not only give huge time savings over a brute-force
implementation, but also cut down on memory usage
(which could easily crash a machine with a sets as small as 100K elements).

💥

This technique will work well until the size of N_A^2 becomes unmanagely large.
In a case like that, you should try a probabalistic algorithm like HyperLogLog, Count Min Sketch or MinHash:
* http://bravenewgeek.com/tag/count-min-sketch/
* https://redislabs.com/blog/count-min-sketch-the-art-and-science-of-estimating-stuff#.V-6Mctz3aaM
* https://tech.shareaholic.com/2012/12/03/the-count-min-sketch-how-to-count-over-large-keyspaces-when-about-right-is-good-enough/

Some sample packages to do these kinds of operations are algebird and datasketch:
* https://github.com/twitter/algebird
* https://github.com/ekzhu/datasketch