Stratified Sampling Meets Machine Learning
Edo Liberty, Kevin Lang, Konstantin Shmakov
Abstract
This paper solves a specialized regression problem to obtain sampling probabilities for records in databases. The goal is to sample a small set of records over which evaluating aggregate queries can be done both efficiently and accurately. We provide a principled and provable solution for this problem; it is parameterless and requires no data insights. Unlike standard regression problems, the loss is inversely proportional to the regressed-to values. Moreover, a cost zero solution always exists and can only be excluded by hard budget constraints. A unique form of regularization is also needed. We provide an efficient and simple regularized Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) algorithm along with a theoretical generalization result. Our extensive experimental results significantly improve over both uniform sampling and standard stratified sampling which are de-facto the industry standards.
BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v48-liberty16,
title = {Stratified Sampling Meets Machine Learning},
author = {Liberty, Edo and Lang, Kevin and Shmakov, Konstantin},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {2320--2329},
year = {2016},
editor = {Balcan, Maria Florina and Weinberger, Kilian Q.},
volume = {48},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
address = {New York, New York, USA},
month = {20--22 Jun},
publisher = {PMLR},
pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/liberty16.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v48/liberty16.html},
abstract = {This paper solves a specialized regression problem to obtain sampling probabilities for records in databases. The goal is to sample a small set of records over which evaluating aggregate queries can be done both efficiently and accurately. We provide a principled and provable solution for this problem; it is parameterless and requires no data insights. Unlike standard regression problems, the loss is inversely proportional to the regressed-to values. Moreover, a cost zero solution always exists and can only be excluded by hard budget constraints. A unique form of regularization is also needed. We provide an efficient and simple regularized Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) algorithm along with a theoretical generalization result. Our extensive experimental results significantly improve over both uniform sampling and standard stratified sampling which are de-facto the industry standards.}
}