NAE-SAT-based probabilistic membership filters

TL;DR

This paper introduces an improved probabilistic membership filter using NAE-SAT formulas, enhancing construction and query efficiency for large-scale data verification tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel NAE-SAT-based filter approach that reduces building and query times compared to previous SAT-based filters.

Findings

Reduced filter construction times

Faster query performance

Potential for enterprise-scale applications

Abstract

Probabilistic membership filters are a type of data structure designed to quickly verify whether an element of a large data set belongs to a subset of the data. While false negatives are not possible, false positives are. Therefore, the main goal of any good probabilistic membership filter is to have a small false-positive rate while being memory efficient and fast to query. Although Bloom filters are fast to construct, their memory efficiency is bounded by a strict theoretical upper bound. Weaver et al. introduced random satisfiability-based filters that significantly improved the efficiency of the probabilistic filters, however, at the cost of solving a complex random satisfiability (SAT) formula when constructing the filter. Here we present an improved SAT filter approach with a focus on reducing the filter building times, as well as query times. Our approach is based on using not-all-equal (NAE) SAT formulas to build the filters, solving these via a mapping to random SAT using traditionally-fast random SAT solvers, as well as bit packing and the reduction of the number of hash functions. Paired with fast hardware, NAE-SAT filters could result in enterprise-size applications.