Continuous ranking on uncertain streams

Abstract

Data uncertainty widely exists in many web applications, financial applications and sensor networks. Ranking queries that return a number of tuples with maximal ranking scores are important in the field of database management. Most existing work focuses on proposing static solutions for various ranking semantics over uncertain data. Our focus is to handle continuous ranking queries on uncertain data streams: testing each new tuple to output highly-ranked tuples. The main challenge comes from not only the fact that the possible world space will grow exponentially when new tuples arrive, but also the requirement for low space- and time-complexity to adapt to the streaming environments. This paper aims at handling continuous ranking queries on uncertain data streams. We first study how to handle this issue exactly, then we propose a novel method (exponential sampling) to estimate the expected rank of a tuple with high quality. Analysis in theory and detailed experimental reports evaluate the proposed methods.