Less hashing, same performance: building a better bloom filter

  • Authors:
  • Adam Kirsch;Michael Mitzenmacher

  • Affiliations:
  • Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA;Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • ESA'06 Proceedings of the 14th conference on Annual European Symposium - Volume 14
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

A standard technique from the hashing literature is to use two hash functions h1(x) and h2(x) to simulate additional hash functions of the form gi(x) = h1(x) + i h2(x). We demonstrate that this technique can be usefully applied to Bloom filters and related data structures. Specifically, only two hash functions are necessary to effectively implement a Bloom filter without any loss in the asymptotic false positive probability. This leads to less computation and potentially less need for randomness in practice.