Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: approximate string matching - Bloom filters


From: "Mateusz Berezecki" <mateuszb () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 20:19:23 +0200

On 9/1/06, Fausett, Mark (US SSA) <mark.fausett () baesystems com> wrote:
Bloom filters are approximate in a different sense though -- Think of
them as space efficient, but lossy token sets; you put a bunch of tokens
in, and subsequently can query whether a particular token was placed
into the set; to some degree of confidence.
Bloom filters are subject to false positives -- they'll sometimes
incorrectly tell you that a token is in the set -- but not false
negatives.  Because hashing functions are used to insert tokens into the
bloom filter, the false positives have nothing to do with approximate
string matches.


By trial end error I already discovered this really unwanted behavior :-/

It's very good for representing what is not in the set rather than representing
the set itself.

Mateusz
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