Related papers: Approximate counting with a floating-point counter
Storing a counter incremented $N$ times would naively consume $O(\log N)$ bits of memory. In 1978 Morris described the very first streaming algorithm: the "Morris Counter". His algorithm's space bound is a random variable, and it has been…
The celebrated Morris counter uses $\log_2\log_2 n + O(\log_2 \sigma^{-1})$ bits to count up to $n$ with a relative error $\sigma$, where if $\hat{\lambda}$ is the estimate of the current count $\lambda$, then…
Recently we introduced a class of number representations denoted RN-representations, allowing an un-biased rounding-to-nearest to take place by a simple truncation. In this paper we briefly review the binary fixed-point representation in an…
Nowadays, parallel computing is ubiquitous in several application fields, both in engineering and science. The computations rely on the floating-point arithmetic specified by the IEEE754 Standard. In this context, an elementary brick of…
Many streaming algorithms provide only a high-probability relative approximation. These two relaxations, of allowing approximation and randomization, seem necessary -- for many streaming problems, both relaxations must be employed…
I present two new methods for exactly summing a set of floating-point numbers, and then correctly rounding to the nearest floating-point number. Higher accuracy than simple summation (rounding after each addition) is important in many…
Floating-point computations are quickly finding their way in the design of safety- and mission-critical systems, despite the fact that designing floating-point algorithms is significantly more difficult than designing integer algorithms.…
This paper considers a probabilistic model for floating-point computation in which the roundoff errors are represented by bounded random variables with mean zero. Using this model, a probabilistic bound is derived for the forward error of…
Efficient number representation is essential for federated learning, natural language processing, and network measurement solutions. Due to timing, area, and power constraints, such applications use narrow bit-width (e.g., 8-bit) number…
We propose a novel floating-point encoding scheme that builds on prior work involving fixed-point encodings. We encode floating-point numbers using Two's Complement fixed-point mantissas and Two's Complement integral exponents. We used our…
Debugging accumulation of floating-point errors is hard; ideally, computer should track it automatically. Here we consider twofold approximation of an exact real with value + error pair of floating-point numbers. Normally, value + error sum…
Given a combinatorial decomposition for a counting problem, we resort to the simple scheme of approximating large numbers by floating-point representations in order to obtain efficient Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes (FPTASes)…
For scientific computations on a digital computer the set of real number is usually approximated by a finite set F of "floating-point" numbers. We compare the numerical accuracy possible with difference choices of F having approximately the…
Finite-precision floating point arithmetic unavoidably introduces rounding errors which are traditionally bounded using a worst-case analysis. However, worst-case analysis might be overly conservative because worst-case errors can be…
We consider the error due to a single bit-flip in a floating point number. We assume IEEE 754 double precision arithmetic, which encodes binary floating point numbers in a 64-bit word. We assume that the bit-flip happens randomly so it has…
Frugal computing is becoming an important topic for environmental reasons. In this context, several techniques have been proposed to reduce the storage of scientific data by dedicated compression methods specially tailored for arrays of…
The study addresses the problem of precision in floating-point (FP) computations. A method for estimating the errors which affect intermediate and final results is proposed and a summary of many software simulations is discussed. The basic…
Count-Min Sketch is a widely adopted algorithm for approximate event counting in large scale processing. However, the original version of the Count-Min-Sketch (CMS) suffers of some deficiences, especially if one is interested by the…
In this paper, we improve the usual relative error bound for the computation of x^n through iterated multiplications by x in binary floating-point arithmetic. The obtained error bound is only slightly better than the usual one, but it is…
In 1998, Brassard, Hoyer, Mosca, and Tapp (BHMT) gave a quantum algorithm for approximate counting. Given a list of $N$ items, $K$ of them marked, their algorithm estimates $K$ to within relative error $\varepsilon$ by making only $O\left(…