Giorgio Vinciguerra

Stefan Hermann, Hans-Peter Lehmann, Giorgio Vinciguerra et al.

We consider the task of constructing a data structure for associating a static set of keys with values, while allowing arbitrary output values for queries involving keys outside the set. Compared to hash tables, these so-called static function data structures do not need to store the key set and thus use significantly less memory. Several techniques are known, with compressed static functions approaching the zero-order empirical entropy of the value sequence. In this paper, we introduce learned static functions, which use machine learning to capture correlations between keys and values. For each key, a model predicts a probability distribution over the values, from which we derive a key-specific prefix code to compactly encode the true value. The resulting codeword is stored in a classic static function data structure. This design allows learned static functions to break the zero-order entropy barrier while still supporting point queries. Our experiments show substantial space savings: up to one order of magnitude on real data, and up to three orders of magnitude on synthetic data.

Andrea Guerra, Giorgio Vinciguerra, Antonio Boffa et al.

Time series play a crucial role in many fields, including finance, healthcare, industry, and environmental monitoring. The storage and retrieval of time series can be challenging due to their unstoppable growth. In fact, these applications often sacrifice precious historical data to make room for new data. General-purpose compressors can mitigate this problem with their good compression ratios, but they lack efficient random access on compressed data, thus preventing real-time analyses. Ad-hoc streaming solutions, instead, typically optimise only for compression and decompression speed, while giving up compression effectiveness and random access functionality. Furthermore, all these methods lack awareness of certain special regularities of time series, whose trends over time can often be described by some linear and nonlinear functions. To address these issues, we introduce NeaTS, a randomly-accessible compression scheme that approximates the time series with a sequence of nonlinear functions of different kinds and shapes, carefully selected and placed by a partitioning algorithm to minimise the space. The approximation residuals are bounded, which allows storing them in little space and thus recovering the original data losslessly, or simply discarding them to obtain a lossy time series representation with maximum error guarantees. Our experiments show that NeaTS improves the compression ratio of the state-of-the-art lossy compressors that use linear or nonlinear functions (or both) by up to 14%. Compared to lossless compressors, NeaTS emerges as the only approach to date providing, simultaneously, compression ratios close to or better than the best existing compressors, a much faster decompression speed, and orders of magnitude more efficient random access, thus enabling the storage and real-time analysis of massive and ever-growing amounts of (historical) time series data.