Some Important Streaming Algorithms You Should Know About

Ted Dunning, Chief Applications Architect for MapR, presented a session titled: "Some Important Streaming Algorithms You Should Know About" at the Spark Summit 2015 conference held in San Francisco. During the session, he highlighted some newer streaming algorithms such as t-digest and streaming k-means. This article is adapted from his talk. The key thing about streaming algorithms is they have to be approximate algorithms. There are a few things that you can compute exactly in a streaming fashion, but there are lots of important things that you can't compute that way, so we have to approximate. Most important aggregates can be approximated online.