# Cardinality estimation in parallel

### Introduction 🧮

First, what is cardinality? It’s counting the unique elements of a field. In SQL, something like SELECT DISTINCT field FROM table. You can definitely count unique elements this way but the trouble begins when you want to do quick analyses on big data. If you want to explore relationships between two variables, it may involve multiple GROUP BYs and other operations for every pair of variables that you want to explore. This is especially tedious and expensive if you were to explore every combination of fields. I’m no expert in big O notation estimates, but this sounds like O(n²) to me. And O(n²) is considering pairs, it could grow to O(nᵐ) if you wanted to compare m columns. With probalistic data structures like HyperLogLog and MinHash, we can compute this for every column, so then the cost is only around O(n). See the references listed at the bottom for in-depth discussions on probalistic data structures, the class of data structures that HyperLogLog and MinHash belong to.

### What I’m doing ⚙️

I’m modifying a Python implementation of HyperLogLog to work with Dask. So far, the modifications have included serialization and adding the ability to get cardinality for intersections (HyperLogLog proper calculates cardinality for unions only). I wanted to document my adventure here.

### Exploring the data 📊

Usually, we would like to count the number of distinct users who did x and also did y. I looked for a fairly large dataset (a few GB) that was open and interesting and found the Chicago Divvy Bike Share dataset. Instead of distinct users, this dataset’s primary key is trip_id. The data is 9495235 rows long and has 9495188 unique trip_ids (there are a small number of dupes present). I broke this into 128 MiB chunks, which makes 16 partitions. Partitions are what makes dask parallel. And in this case, if you had 16 cores, you could get a 16X speedup. Plus, dask is out-of-core, meaning that you can process datasets larger than your ram. Dask recommends just using pandas if your dataset fits in memory.

trip_id year month week day hour usertype gender starttime stoptime tripduration temperature events from_station_id from_station_name latitude_start longitude_start dpcapacity_start to_station_id to_station_name latitude_end longitude_end dpcapacity_end
0 2355134 2014 6 27 0 23 Subscriber Male 2014-06-30 23:57:00 2014-07-01 00:07:00 10.0667 68 tstorms 131 Lincoln Ave & Belmont Ave 41.9394 -87.6684 15 303 Broadway & Cornelia Ave 41.9455 -87.646 15
1 2355133 2014 6 27 0 23 Subscriber Male 2014-06-30 23:56:00 2014-07-01 00:00:00 4.38333 68 tstorms 282 Halsted St & Maxwell St 41.8646 -87.6469 15 22 May St & Taylor St 41.8695 -87.6555 15
2 2355130 2014 6 27 0 23 Subscriber Male 2014-06-30 23:33:00 2014-06-30 23:35:00 2.1 68 tstorms 327 Sheffield Ave & Webster Ave 41.9217 -87.6537 19 225 Halsted St & Dickens Ave 41.9199 -87.6488 15
3 2355129 2014 6 27 0 23 Subscriber Female 2014-06-30 23:26:00 2014-07-01 00:24:00 58.0167 68 tstorms 134 Peoria St & Jackson Blvd 41.8777 -87.6496 19 194 State St & Wacker Dr 41.8872 -87.6278 11
4 2355128 2014 6 27 0 23 Subscriber Female 2014-06-30 23:16:00 2014-06-30 23:26:00 10.6333 68 tstorms 320 Loomis St & Lexington St 41.8722 -87.6615 15 134 Peoria St & Jackson Blvd 41.8777 -87.6496 19

Something that I wanted to explore here is something that I knew would overlap, so I picked gender and month as my pair of variables that I wanted to explore.

This is the groupby count for trip_id for every combination of the values in month and gender:

month gender count
0 1 Female 50003
1 1 Male 221712
2 2 Female 60649
3 2 Male 245326
4 3 Female 92346
5 3 Male 345583
6 4 Female 144702
7 4 Male 476986
8 5 Female 216973
9 5 Male 652611
10 6 Female 319679
11 6 Male 858546
12 7 Female 355774
13 7 Male 923731
14 8 Female 356374
15 8 Male 948329
16 9 Female 314032
17 9 Male 875939
18 10 Female 244807
19 10 Male 752905
20 11 Female 145102
21 11 Male 498454
22 12 Female 78234
23 12 Male 316438

We can use this to verify is our probabilistic data structures are doing the right thing.

### Great! But there’s a problem…👹

When I first started using and modifying the HyperLogLog Python package, I thought this was all that I would need to get cardinality estimates for combinations of variables. At this point I didn’t really care how the package worked, as long as it did. To skip to the chase, what I found out is that HyperLogLog only estimates unions, not intersections. My first instinct was to play with the code enough to tease the information out of the functions that I already had. It turns out that one can perform multiple cardinality estimates to calculate arbitrary combinations of unions and intersections, i.e. (A ∪ B) ∩ C, using something called the inclusion-exclusion principle. This is just a fancy way of saying that we can calculate intersections with only unions. For example, if we wanted to get the intersection of A ∩ B, we’d “include” or add the individual cardinalities for A and B, then “exclude” or subtract the cardinality of the union A ∪ B. Needless to say this could get a little complicated to make a function for, and I did make one, but I found out that this method is wildly inaccurate when the original cardinalities of the variables being compared are very different. That is, the error of the inclusion-exclusion principle might be more than the result itself! Bummer. 🙁

### Not to fear, MinHash is here! 😁

So, the way to solve this was to tack on another probabilistic data structure to solve for intersections. I can get into the details of HyperLogLog later (or not, and just refer you to some papers or blogs), but we have to hash every unique element of the field that we are considering the cardinality for (in the above example, it’s trip_id). FYI- without saying too much about the details- HyperLogLog is a fancy way of counting zeros to estimate cardinality. HyperLogLog uses “registers” to store the result of adding a new element. The main engine is elements that were added previously, will not be added again because they will be hashed in exactly the same way and added to the same registers. There are more elements than number of registers, so there will be collisions (mistakes), that’s why HyperLogLog is an estimate and not an exact amount. Unions of elements are as easy as taking the max of there registers. We can serialize the result as a small string, saving space on the millions or billions of elements that we would otherwise have to keep track of. At the record level, it doesn’t make any sense to have hll data structures, but the magic comes in when you combine them and for, say, all of the unique values for each of your variables.

So where does MinHash come into play? It turns out that our hll registers aren’t good enough to easily create cardinality estimates for intersections, as mentioned above. We need to add a the MinHash, or k number of MinHashes to each element. I did this by creating a seperate number of registers, calculating an element’s MinHash using a single hash function, then adding that value to the registers if it was low enough. This is all just an elaborate way of saying that I “sampled” the variable of interest (in this case trip_id). This sampling would look like this:

The result of this sampling is that we can find the proportion of the intersection to the union, which is called the Jaccard Index. Mathematically, J = ( A ∩ B ) / ( A ∪ B ), where J is the Jaccard Index. So, we can use this to get our intersection by A ∩ B = J ( A ∪ B ). So we can get the intersection by calculating the Jaccard Index using MinHash and multiplying it by the union, calculted by the HyperLogLog, our old friend.

### On to how I did it, or, wait? ⏳

So, in short I modified an existing HyperLogLog Python package to accomplish this. But first let me explain a bit of motivation (maybe I should have done this first?). I noticed that in data science and machine learning, it’s really helpful to calculate the correlation of multiple variables. In pandas you can do this with df.corr() and produce a beautiful grid matrix of all the different relationships of the variables. But what if your data is mostly categorical, or what if you have big data, or both. It’s not as obvious how to see if two variables are related to each other. One intuitive way we might do this is by something to think of our data like DNA matching, but instead of DNA, we’re matching users.

But this breaks down when you consider that users don’t necessarily have a particular order that they appear in for the variables to be correlated. So we are limited to how many users are shared across two variables. But variables aren’t the ultimate unit. Each variable has several values. We can call this more fundamental unit a Key-Value Pair, or KVP. The overlap of KVPs of one variable with the overlap of the KVPs of another variable are really what we want to get at to determine if the variables are related in any way. If two KVPs have exactly the same number of users, then we can be pretty sure that there must be some sort of relation. For example, we might find that users of a magazine variable correspond to the same users of a book variable. Then upon further inpection, the value of the magazine variable is for science fiction and the value of the book variable is astronomy. So, it makes sense why these two KVPs would have the same users.

Let’s summarize and expand each step here. I’m just going to put the heart of the code here. See this for the full Jupyter Notebook.

#### Map reduce functions

1. Make function to apply HLL to each element in a series.
2. Map function to each element in parallel.
3. Reduce to combine HLLs over desired range (unioning these elements).
4. (Optional) Get cardinality from combined function.

############ map steps #############

def hll_count_series(series):
hll = hyperloglog.HyperLogLog(0.01)  # accept 1% counting error
return hll

res = ddf['trip_id'].map_partitions(hll_count_series, meta=('this_result','f8'))

res = res.to_delayed()

########## reduce steps ############

def hll_reduce(x, y):
x.update(y)
return x

L = res
while len(L) > 1:
new_L = []
for i in range(0, len(L), 2):
new_L.append(lazy)
L = new_L                       # swap old list for new



#### Group by functionality

We want to further this process to use with multiple combinations of variables and values, but this time we terminate the functionality with serialization of the HLL object so that we can instantiate it on the fly, that is, when we want to do analysis or quick computation, like in a dashboard.

1. Make function that encapsulates previous “simple function” and then applies it to every variable and value of interest.
2. Terminate with serialization of HLL object.
3. Re-instantiate and run analysis like intersection.

Here’s the code-in-brief used for these steps:

def hll_serialize(x):
return x.serialize()

def get_serialized_hll( series ):
res = series.map_partitions( hll_count_series , meta=('this_result','f8'))
return S

def groupby_approx_counts( ddf, x, countby='trip_id' ):
'''
input: takes in dask dataframe and item to group by, as well as item to count by
output: tuple containing: list of unique values in the item to group by, a list of dask delayed objects with the serialized hll object
'''
results = []
uniques = ddf[x].unique().compute().tolist()
for value in uniques:
results.append( get_serialized_hll( ddf[ ddf[x]==value ][countby] ) )

return x, uniques, serial_objs


### Parallelized estimate results

The moment you’ve been waiting for…

month gender card estimate card actual percent diff
0 1 Female 51188 50003 -2.37%
1 1 Male 222455 221712 -0.34%
2 2 Female 59210 60649 2.37%
3 2 Male 246677 245326 -0.55%
4 3 Female 93464 92346 -1.21%
5 3 Male 340408 345583 1.5%
6 4 Female 141403 144702 2.28%
7 4 Male 476394 476986 0.12%
8 5 Female 212724 216973 1.96%
9 5 Male 668272 652611 -2.4%
10 6 Female 321649 319679 -0.62%
11 6 Male 871597 858546 -1.52%
12 7 Female 360552 355774 -1.34%
13 7 Male 930521 923731 -0.74%
14 8 Female 356013 356374 0.1%
15 8 Male 952413 948329 -0.43%
16 9 Female 313715 314032 0.1%
17 9 Male 879395 875939 -0.39%
18 10 Female 246669 244807 -0.76%
19 10 Male 759524 752905 -0.88%
20 11 Female 141407 145102 2.55%
21 11 Male 509001 498454 -2.12%
22 12 Female 76642 78234 2.03%
23 12 Male 321145 316438 -1.49%

Not too bad, not too bad. Could be worse. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At least it’s better than the intersections by the inclusion-exclusion rule:

month gender card_int card actual perc diff
0 1 Female 44596 50003 10.81%
1 1 Male 216517 221712 2.34%
2 2 Female 77474 60649 -27.74%
3 2 Male 255826 245326 -4.28%
4 3 Female 107591 92346 -16.51%
5 3 Male 359199 345583 -3.94%
6 4 Female 159666 144702 -10.34%
7 4 Male 476835 476986 0.03%
8 5 Female 233786 216973 -7.75%
9 5 Male 664212 652611 -1.78%
10 6 Female 320897 319679 -0.38%
11 6 Male 866065 858546 -0.88%
12 7 Female 358388 355774 -0.73%
13 7 Male 954115 923731 -3.29%
14 8 Female 371748 356374 -4.31%
15 8 Male 942378 948329 0.63%
16 9 Female 322049 314032 -2.55%
17 9 Male 862643 875939 1.52%
18 10 Female 246845 244807 -0.83%
19 10 Male 762295 752905 -1.25%
20 11 Female 155851 145102 -7.41%
21 11 Male 513240 498454 -2.97%
22 12 Female 86019 78234 -9.95%
23 12 Male 314132 316438 0.73%

### Happy App-y

To demostrate the power of this data structure, I made a ipywidgets app that can explore the cardinalities of different intersections. The setup should be intuitive here, but behind the scenes, the app is calculating the unions between values of the same fields and the intersections of all of these results. What you get is a nearly realtime exploratory tool of the data. To do this with exact counts, you would need to do groupby sums on different cuts of the data, which would take a lot longer.

### Summary statistics

Another really powerful advantage of this method of computing cardinality is quickly getting summary statistics about our data. This was actually my first motativation of implementing everything here. I wanted to get the “correlation” between two categorical variables on a large dataset, but this took 4 days to compute the the groupby counts for every pair of fields in the dataset. This method, in opposition, would take minutes. Here’s a case where this statistic was calculated for a very small dataset and was able to find highly correlated coefficients.

Theil’s U (uncertainty coefficient):

with

or with N:

Using this on our data above, we get
U ( gender | month ) = 0.003743 for gender given a month, and
U ( month | gender ) = 0.000888 for month given a gender.
So, neither of these are highly correlated. But we do get more information about gender from a given month, than month given a gender (it’s 4.2 times more).