Re: Finding population size

[Matt Abrams]

Hi Jason -

I'm glad you are interested in using stream-lib. In order to help
give you some guidance it would be helpful to know what your intended
use case is? Are you looking at the bloom filters, counters, top
estimators?

For your second question. What do you mean by population size? If
you are just talking about the number of objects you've offered to the
counter then your idea of using count++ is fine. If you do want to
subclass the counters to keep track of this separately then you will
also need to make sure to update the merge and serialization methods
so that the offer count is persisted and merged correctly if you are
working with multiple counters.

Matt

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Jason Kolb <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> First of all, thanks for making this project available, it's very
> interesting. I have two (hopefully quick) questions:
>
> Is there any primer for how to use it? I'm trying to figure it out by
> looking at the unit tests but there seems to be several ways to use it and
> I'm a little lost in that regard.
>
> Secondly, is there any way to find the actual population size using the
> HyperLogLog estimator? I'd like to not only see the cardinality but also the
> population size. I can always subclass it and record the count separately
> (it'd be a simple counter, count++ type of thing), but it seems like there's
> some more direct method that I'm missing.
>
> Thanks!
> Jason