Fuzzy joins in MapReduce

Abstract

We report experimental results for the MapReduce algorithms proposed by Afrati, Das Sarma, Menestrina, Parameswaran and Ullman in ICDE'12 to compute fuzzy joins of binary strings using Hamming Distance. Their algorithms come with complete theoretical analysis, however, no experimental evaluation is provided. They argue that there is a tradeoff between communication cost and processing cost, and that there is a skyline of the proposed algorithms; i.e. none dominates another. We observe via experiments that, from a practical point of view, some algorithms are almost always preferable to others. We provide detailed experimental results and insights that show the different facets of each algorithm.