On the performance of balanced hashing functions when the keys are not equiprobable

Authors:
Christos H. Papadimitriou;Philip A. Bernstein
Affiliations:
Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA;Center for Research in Computing Technology, Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Venue:
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Year:
1980

Citing 2
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Abstract

The cost (expected number of accesses per retrieval) of hashing functions is examined without the assumption that it is equally probable for all keys to be present in the table. It is shown that the obvious strategy—trying to balance the sums of probabilities of the keys mapped to any given address—may be suboptimal; however, the difference from the exactly optimal distribution cannot be large.