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MinHash

MinHash signatures, and the Jaccard estimate two of them give.

public sealed class MinHash

Example — two sentences differing by one word.

using Lodestar.Text.Similarity;

var permutations = new MinHashPermutations([3UL, 5UL, 7UL, 11UL], [13UL, 17UL, 19UL, 23UL]);
var hasher = new MinHash(permutations);

uint[] fox = hasher.Signature(["the", "quick", "brown", "fox"]);
uint[] dog = hasher.Signature(["the", "quick", "brown", "dog"]);

double estimate = MinHash.Jaccard(fox, dog);  // => 0.75
int length = hasher.Length;  // => 4

Members — one page each.

Member	What it does
MinHash.Signature	The signature of a set of tokens
MinHash.Jaccard	The estimate two signatures give

Remarks — reference behaviour is datasketch 1.6.5's MinHash. A signature is one minimum per permutation, so it sees a set and not a bag: a token repeated changes nothing, because a minimum is idempotent. That is the line between this and SimHash, which sums weights and does see the repeat.

Four permutations is a documentation size, not a working one. The estimate is a share of agreeing slots, so its resolution is 1 / Length — four permutations can only ever answer 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 or 1. The reference defaults to 128, and an index that has to separate 0.78 from 0.82 needs at least that.

Exact against the reference, and exactly rather than within a tolerance: a signature is a list of hashes, so any difference at all means the algorithm diverged rather than the arithmetic. The corpus in tests/oracles/text_similarity.json freezes eight documents and the permutations they were built with.

Immutable once built, and safe to use from any number of threads at once.

Applies to — net10.0, netstandard2.0.

See also — SimHash, LshIndex, MinHashPermutations, the set-similarity index.