Categorical attributes are those that can take a discrete set of values, e.g., colours. This work is about compressing vectors over categorical attributes to low-dimension discrete vectors. The current hash-based methods compressing vectors over categorical attributes to low-dimension discrete vectors do not provide any guarantee on the Hamming distances between the compressed representations. Here we presentFSketchto create sketches for a sparse categorical data and an estimator to estimate the pairwise Hamming distances among the uncompressed data only from their sketches. We claim that these sketches can be used in the usual data mining tasks in place of the original data without compromising the quality of the task. For that we ensure that the sketches also are categorical, sparse, and the Hamming distance estimates are reasonably precise. Both the sketch construction and the Hamming distance estimation algorithms require just a single-pass; furthermore, changes to a data point can be incorporated into its sketch in an efficient manner. The compressibility depends upon how sparse the data is and is independent of the original dimension – making our algorithm attractive for many real-life scenarios. Our claims are backed by rigorous theoretical analysis of the properties ofFSketchand supplemented by extensive comparative evaluations with related algorithms on some real-world datasets. We show thatFSketchis significantly faster, and the accuracy obtained by using its sketches are among the top for the standard unsupervised tasks of$\mathrm{RMSE}$, clustering and similarity search.

Representation learning using network embedding has received tremendous attention due to its efficacy to solve downstream tasks. Popular embedding methods (such as deepwalk,node2vec,LINE) are based on a neural architecture, thus unable to scale on large networks both in terms of time and space usage. Recently, we proposed BinSketch, a sketching technique for compressing binary vectors to binary vectors. In this paper, we show how to extend BinSketch and use it for network hashing. Our proposal named QUINT is built upon BinSketch, and it embeds nodes of a sparse network onto a low-dimensional space using simple bit-wise operations. QUINT is the first of its kind that provides tremendous gain in terms of speed and space usage without compromising much on the accuracy of the downstream tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to compare QUINT with seven state-of-the-art network embedding methods for two end tasks link prediction and node classification. We observe huge performance gain for QUINT in terms of speedup (up to 7000) and space saving (up to 800) due to its bit-wise nature to obtain node embedding.Moreover, QUINT is a consistent top-performer for both the tasks among the baselines across all the datasets. Our empirical observations are backed by rigorous theoretical analysis to justify the effectiveness of QUINT.