Most efficient way to count occurrences?

Question

I'm looking to calculate entropy and mutual information a huge number of times in performance-critical code. As an intermediate step, I need to count the number of occurrences of each value. For example:

uint[] myArray = [1,1,2,1,4,5,2];
uint[] occurrences = countOccurrences(myArray);
// Occurrences == [3, 2, 1, 1] or some permutation of that.
// 3 occurrences of 1, 2 occurrences of 2, one each of 4 and 5.

Of course the obvious ways to do this are either using an associative array or by sorting the input array using a "standard" sorting algorithm like quick sort. For small integers, like bytes, the code is currently specialized to use a plain old array.

Is there any clever algorithm to do this more efficiently than a hash table or a "standard" sorting algorithm will offer, such as an associative array implementation that heavily favors updates over insertions or a sorting algorithm that shines when your data has a lot of ties?

Note: Non-sparse integers are just one example of a possible data type. I'm looking to implement a reasonably generic solution here, though since integers and structs containing only integers are common cases, I'd be interested in solutions specific to these if they are extremely efficient.

Answer 1

Hashing is generally more scalable, as another answer indicates. However, for many possible distributions (and many real-life cases, where subarrays just happen to be often sorted, depending on how the overall array was put together), timsort is often "preternaturally good" (closer to O(N) than to O(N log N)) -- I hear it's probably going to become the standard/default sorting algorithm in Java at some reasonably close future data (it's been the standard sorting algorithm in Python for years now).

There's no really good way to address such problems except to benchmark on a selection of cases that are representative of the real-life workload you expect to be experiencing (with the obvious risk that you may choose a sample that actually happened to be biased/non-representative -- that's not a small risk if you're trying to build a library that will be used by many external users outside of your control).

Answer 2

Please tell more about your data.

• How many items are there?
• What is the expected ratio of unique items to total items?
• What is the distribution of actual values of your integers? Are they usually small enough to use a simple counting array? Or are they clustered into reasonably narrow groups? Etc.

In any case, I suggest the following idea: a mergesort modified to count duplicates.

That is, you work in terms of not numbers but pairs (number, frequency) (you might use some clever memory-efficient representation for that, for example two arrays instead of an array of pairs etc.).

You start with [(x1,1), (x2,1), ...] and do a mergesort as usual, but when you merge two lists that start with the same value, you put the value into the output list with their sum of occurences. On your example:

[1:1,1:1,2:1,1:1,4:1,5:1,2:1]
Split into [1:1, 1:1, 2:1] and [1:1, 4:1, 5:1, 2:1]
Recursively process them; you get [1:2, 2:1] and [1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 5:1]
Merge them: (first / second / output)
[1:2, 2:1] / [1:1, 2:1, 4:1, 5:1] / [] - we add up 1:2 and 1:1 and get 1:3
[2:1] / [2:1, 4:1, 5:1] / [1:3] - we add up 2:1 and 2:1 and get 2:2
[] / [4:1, 5:1] / [1:3, 2:2]
[1:3, 2:2, 4:1, 5:1]

This might be improved greatly by using some clever tricks to do an initial reduction of the array (obtain an array of value:occurence pairs that is much smaller than the original, but the sum of 'occurence' for each 'value' is equal to the number of occurences of 'value' in the original array). For example, split the array into continuous blocks where values differ by no more than 256 or 65536 and use a small array to count occurences inside each block. Actually this trick can be applied at later merging phases, too.

Answer 3

With an array of integers like in the example, the most effient way would be to have an array of ints and index it based using your values (as you appear to be doing already).

If you can't do that, I can't think of a better alternative than a hashmap. You just need to have a fast hashing algorithm. You can't get better than O(n) performance if you want to use all your data. Is it an option to use only a portion of the data you have?

(Note that sorting and counting is asymptotically slower (O(n*log(n))) than using a hashmap based solution (O(n)).)