CONSISTENT WEIGHTED SAMPLING OF MULTISETS AND DISTRIBUTIONS

Techniques are provided that identify near-duplicate items in large collections of items. A list of (value, frequency) pairs is received, and a sample (value, instance) is returned. The value is chosen from the values of the first list, and the instance is a value less than frequency, in such a way that the probability of selecting the same sample from two lists is equal to the similarity of the two lists.