Method and system for estimating the cardinality of information

A computing system:

• one or more processors;
• and
• a memory in communication with the one or more processors, wherein the memory stores instruction code that, when executed by the one or more processors, causes the computing system to perform operations comprising:
• generating, via hash logic, hash values for each element of a collection of elements;
• specifying, in a sketch-frequency table, a set of discrete statistical values associated with the hash values and, for each discrete statistical value of the set of discrete statistical values, information indicative of a frequency at which the hash values are associated with the discrete statistical value;
• and
• estimating a cardinality of the collection of elements based on the sketch-frequency table.

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 for each element of a collection of elements;
• specifying, in a sketch-frequency table, a set of discrete statistical values associated with binary representations of the hash values and, for each discrete statistical value of the set of discrete statistical values, information indicative of a frequency at which binary representations of the hash values are associated with the discrete statistical value;
• and
• estimating a cardinality of the collection of elements based on the sketch-frequency table.