Modeling skewed distributions using multifractals and the '80-20 law'

Summary: Models skewed attribute distributions as multifractals under a p/(1−p) (80/20) law, estimating parameters from top multiplicities and frequency moments. Outperforms uniformity-based DBMS estimators and uniquely supports statistics for relation supersets. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 8544
Venue: VLDB
Year: 1996
Pagerank: 5.9939282e-05
Overall Rank: 6,053 | 58.48%
DOI: -

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christos Faloutsos (University of Maryland)
2. Yossi Matias (AT&T)
3. Avi Silberschatz (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@article{faloutsos_vldb96,
        title = {{Modeling skewed distributions using multifractals and the '80-20 law'}},
        author = {Faloutsos, Christos and Matias, Yossi and Silberschatz, Avi},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '96},
        pages = {307},
        year = {1996}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
363	Approximate Query Processing: Taming the TeraBytes! A Tutorial	2001	VLDB	0.0002005475
1,512	On the Analysis of Indexing Schemes	1997	PODS	0.00010536001
4,222	Density Biased Sampling: An Improved Method for Data Mining and Clustering	2000	SIGMOD	6.8227421e-05
8,964	Modeling Skew in Data Streams	2006	SIGMOD	5.3433303e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0024089429
75	Sampling-Based Estimation of the Number of Distinct Values of an Attribute	1995	VLDB	0.00037277061
118	Equi-Depth Histograms For Estimating Selectivity Factors For Multi-Dimensional Queries	1988	SIGMOD	0.00031922279
274	Balancing Histogram Optimality and Practicality for Query Result Size Estimation	1995	SIGMOD	0.00022645621
1,059	On B-tree Indices for Skewed Distributions	1992	VLDB	0.00012377809
2,774	Estimating the Selectivity of Spatial Queries Using the 'Correlation' Fractal Dimension	1995	VLDB	8.1372328e-05

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5	2,774	Estimating the Selectivity of Spatial Queries Using the 'Correlation' Fractal Dimension	1995	VLDB
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7	1,448	Skew in Parallel Query Processing	2014	PODS
8	934	Selectivity Estimation and Query Optimization in Large Databases with Highly Skewed Distributions of Column Values	1988	VLDB
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