Phase transition in count approximation by Count-Min sketch with conservative updates

Abstract: Count-Min sketch is a hash-based data structure to represent a dynamically changing associative array of counters. Here we analyse the counting version of Count-Min under a stronger update rule known as \textit{conservative update}, assuming the uniform distribution of input keys. We show that the accuracy of conservative update strategy undergoes a phase transition, depending on the number of distinct keys in the input as a fraction of the size of the Count-Min array. We prove that below the threshold, the relative error is asymptotically $o(1)$ (as opposed to the regular Count-Min strategy), whereas above the threshold, the relative error is $\Theta(1)$. The threshold corresponds to the peelability threshold of random $k$-uniform hypergraphs. We demonstrate that even for small number of keys, peelability of the underlying hypergraph is a crucial property to ensure the $o(1)$ error. Finally, we provide an experimental evidence that the phase transition does not extend to non-uniform distributions, in particular to the popular Zipf's distribution.