Efficient Approximate Algorithms for Empirical Variance with Hashed Block Sampling

Empirical variance is a fundamental concept widely used in data management and data analytics, e.g., query optimization, approximate query processing, and feature selection. A direct solution to derive the empirical variance is scanning the whole data table, which is expensive when the data size is huge. Hence, most current works focus on approximate answers by sampling. For results with approximation guarantees, the samples usually need to be uniformly independent random, incurring high cache miss rates especially in compact columnar style layouts. An alternative uses block sampling to avoid this issue, which directly samples a block of consecutive records fitting page sizes instead of sampling one record each time. However, this provides no theoretical guarantee. Existing studies show that the practical estimations can be inaccurate as the records within a block can be correlated.