Why it matters

Heavy hitters find dominant items. Foundation for anomaly + trending.

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The architecture

Misra-Gries: K-1 counters.

Space-Saving: K counters + min replace.

CountSketch: 2D array.

Heavy hitters algorithmsMisra-GriesK-1 countersSpace-SavingK countersCountSketch2D countersMisra-Gries and Space-Saving give similar guarantees; CountSketch harder but different tradeoffs
Heavy hitters.
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How it works end to end

Guarantee: items with freq > n/K found.

Overestimation bounded.

Merge for distributed.