Why cardinality value in mysql indexes don't equal distinct count for column values

Question

Not a long ago I started to optimize queries for mysql db. I created some indexes and decided to see their params, using show index from syntax. And saw that cardinality doesn't equal distinct count for some columns.

So, I have the table

CREATE TABLE `item_owners` (
  `uid` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `version` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `type_id` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `owner_name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `item_id` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  `status_id` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`uid`),
  KEY `FK181EADBC7346EE24` (`status_id`),
  KEY `FK181EADBC90094D43` (`type_id`),
  KEY `FK181EADBC499E38CA` (`item_id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK181EADBC499E38CA` FOREIGN KEY (`item_id`) REFERENCES `items` (`uid`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK181EADBC7346EE24` FOREIGN KEY (`status_id`) REFERENCES `statuses` (`uid`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK181EADBC90094D43` FOREIGN KEY (`type_id`) REFERENCES `types` (`uid`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

And in that table I have 2M rows(and indeed 2M uniq PK), 500k uniq item_id, 5 uniq status_id and 20 uniq type_id

But when I execute

show index from item_owners

I've got

+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+
| Table       | Non_unique | Key_name           | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type | Comment | Index_comment |
+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+
| item_owners |          0 | PRIMARY            |            1 | uid         | A         |     1893427 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC7346EE24 |            1 | status_id   | A         |          17 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC90094D43 |            1 | type_id     | A         |          17 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC499E38CA |            1 | item_id     | A         |      148000 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+

Then I decided to execute

analyze table item_owners

And after this output was:

+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+
| Table       | Non_unique | Key_name           | Seq_in_index | Column_name | Collation | Cardinality | Sub_part | Packed | Null | Index_type | Comment | Index_comment |
+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+
| item_owners |          0 | PRIMARY            |            1 | uid         | A         |     2005419 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC7346EE24 |            1 | status_id   | A         |          17 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC90094D43 |            1 | type_id     | A         |          17 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
| item_owners |          1 | FK181EADBC499E38CA |            1 | item_id     | A         |     2005419 |     NULL | NULL   |      | BTREE      |         |               |
+-------------+------------+--------------------+--------------+-------------+-----------+-------------+----------+--------+------+------------+---------+---------------+

Anyone know how it possible? , because I really misunderstand why cardinality doesn't equal number of uniq rows even for PK index.

Answer 1

Quoting the manual:

Cardinality

An estimate of the number of unique values in the index. This is updated by running ANALYZE TABLE or myisamchk -a. Cardinality is counted based on statistics stored as integers, so the value is not necessarily exact even for small tables.