Patent ID: 11934399
Assignee: THE NIELSEN COMPANY (US), LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 14:
15. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon instruction code that, when executed by one or more processors of a computing system, causes the computing system to perform operations comprising:
generating, via hash logic, hash values associated with a collection of elements, wherein the hash values specify bit positions within an array of bits, wherein hash values output from the hash logic conform to a geometric distribution of bits such that bit positions of the array of bits corresponding to lower orders bits are more likely to be generated than bit positions corresponding to higher-order bits;
setting bits of the array of bits corresponding to the bit positions;
counting a number of bits of the array of bits that are set;
estimating, by estimation logic, a number of unique elements of the collection of elements as a function of the number of bits of the array of bits that are set,
wherein bit position L(xj) associated with a particular element xj, is determined according to the function:, L
   ⁡
   (
   
    x
    j
   
   )
  
  =
  
   ⌈
   
    
     log
     ⁡
     (
     
      1
      -
      
       h
       ⁡
       (
       
        x
        j
       
       )
      
     
     )
    
    
     log
     ⁡
     (
     
      1
      -
      ρ
     
     )
    
   
   ⌉
  
 

where h corresponds to a hash function that hashes each xj uniformly at random to values in the unit interval and ρ specifies a geometric distribution of the bits across the array of bits.