0.8 Hashing  (Page 8/13)

Probabilistic hashing

Perhaps the simplest solution to a collision is to replace the value that is already in the slot with the new value, or slightly less commonly, drop the record that is to be inserted. In later searches, this may result in a search not finding a record which has been inserted. This technique is particularly useful for implementing caching.

An even more space-efficient solution which is similar to this is use a bit array (an array of one-bit fields) for our table. Initially all bits are set to zero, and when we insert a key, we set the corresponding bit to one. False negatives cannot occur, but false positives can, since if the search finds a 1 bit, it will claim that the value was found, even if it was just another value that hashed into the same array slot by coincidence. In reality, such a hash table is merely a specific type of Bloom filter.

Robin Hood hashing

One interesting variation on double-hashing collision resolution is that of Robin Hood hashing. The idea is that a key already inserted may be displaced by a new key if its probe count is larger than the key at the current position. The net effect of this is that it reduces worst case search times in the table. This is similar to Knuth's ordered hash tables except the criteria for bumping a key does not depend on a direct relationship between the keys.

Table resizing

With a good hash function, a hash table can typically contain about 70%–80% as many elements as it does table slots and still perform well. Depending on the collision resolution mechanism, performance can begin to suffer either gradually or dramatically as more elements are added. To deal with this, when the load factor exceeds some threshold, it is necessary to allocate a new, larger table, and add all the contents of the original table to this new table. In Java's HashMap class, for example, the default load factor threshold is 0.75.

This can be a very expensive operation, and the necessity for it is one of the hash table's disadvantages. In fact, some naive methods for doing this, such as enlarging the table by one each time you add a new element, reduce performance so drastically as to make the hash table useless. However, if the table is enlarged by some fixed percent, such as 10% or 100%, it can be shown using amortized analysis that these resizings are so infrequent that the average time per lookup remains constant-time. To see why this is true, suppose a hash table using chaining begins at the minimum size of 1 and is doubled each time it fills above 100%. If in the end it contains n elements, then the total add operations performed for all the resizings is:

1 + 2 + 4 + ... + n = 2n - 1.

Because the costs of the resizings form a geometric series, the total cost is O(n). But it is necessary also to perform n operations to add the n elements in the first place, so the total time to add n elements with resizing is O(n), an amortized time of O(1) per element.

On the other hand, some hash table implementations, notably in real-time systems, cannot pay the price of enlarging the hash table all at once, because it may interrupt time-critical operations. One simple approach is to initially allocate the table with enough space for the expected number of elements and forbid the addition of too many elements. Another useful but more memory-intensive technique is to perform the resizing gradually: