# A Parallel Space Saving Algorithm For Frequent Items and the Hurwitz zeta distribution

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.0702 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.0702/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Zipf-Gramming: Scaling Byte N-Grams Up to Production Sized Malware Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13808/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a message-passing based parallel version of the Space Saving algorithm designed to solve the k--majority problem. The algorithm determines in parallel frequent items, i.e., those whose frequency is greater than a given threshold, and is therefore useful for iceberg queries and many other different contexts. We apply our algorithm to the detection of frequent items in both real and synthetic datasets whose probability distribution functions are a Hurwitz and a Zipf distribution respectively. Also, we compare its parallel performances and accuracy against a parallel algorithm recently proposed for merging summaries derived by the Space Saving or Frequent algorithms.