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Main Authors: Walther, Paul, Mansour, Wejdene, Zollner, Johann Maximilian, Werner, Martin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02193
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author Walther, Paul
Mansour, Wejdene
Zollner, Johann Maximilian
Werner, Martin
author_facet Walther, Paul
Mansour, Wejdene
Zollner, Johann Maximilian
Werner, Martin
contents These days, Key-Value Stores are widely used for scalable data storage. In this environment, Bloom filter (BF) serves as an efficient probabilistic data structure for representing sets of keys. They allow for set membership queries with no false negatives and with the right choice of the main parameters - length of the BF, number of hash functions used to map an element to the array's indices, and the number of elements inserted - the false positive rate is optimized. However, the number of hash functions is constrained to integer values, and the length of a BF is usually chosen to be a power of two to allow for efficient modulo operations using binary arithmetic. In this paper, we relax these constraints by proposing the Rational Bloom filter, which allows for non-integer numbers of hash functions. This results in optimized fraction-of-zero values for a known number of elements to be inserted. Based on this, we construct the Variably-Sized Block BF to allow for a flexible filter length, especially for large filters, with efficient computation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extending the Applicability of Bloom Filters by Relaxing their Parameter Constraints
Walther, Paul
Mansour, Wejdene
Zollner, Johann Maximilian
Werner, Martin
Data Structures and Algorithms
These days, Key-Value Stores are widely used for scalable data storage. In this environment, Bloom filter (BF) serves as an efficient probabilistic data structure for representing sets of keys. They allow for set membership queries with no false negatives and with the right choice of the main parameters - length of the BF, number of hash functions used to map an element to the array's indices, and the number of elements inserted - the false positive rate is optimized. However, the number of hash functions is constrained to integer values, and the length of a BF is usually chosen to be a power of two to allow for efficient modulo operations using binary arithmetic. In this paper, we relax these constraints by proposing the Rational Bloom filter, which allows for non-integer numbers of hash functions. This results in optimized fraction-of-zero values for a known number of elements to be inserted. Based on this, we construct the Variably-Sized Block BF to allow for a flexible filter length, especially for large filters, with efficient computation.
title Extending the Applicability of Bloom Filters by Relaxing their Parameter Constraints
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02193