ElasticSearch Cardinality Aggregation聚合计算的误差

使用ES不久，今天发现生产环境数据异常，其使用的ES版本是2.1.2，其它版本也类似。通过使用ES的HTTP API进行查询，发现得到的数据跟javaClient API 查询得到的数据不一致，于是对代码逻辑以及ES查询工具产生了怀疑。通过查阅官方文档找到如下描述：

Precision controledit

This aggregation also supports the precision_threshold option:

The precision_threshold option is specific to the current internal implementation of the cardinality agg, which may change in the future

{
    "aggs" : {
        "author_count" : {
            "cardinality" : {
                "field" : "author_hash",
                "precision_threshold": 100 

            }
        }
    }
}

The precision_threshold options allows to trade memory for accuracy, and defines a unique count below which counts are expected to be close to accurate. Above this value, counts might become a bit more fuzzy. The maximum supported value is 40000, thresholds above this number will have the same effect as a threshold of 40000. Default value depends on the number of parent aggregations that multiple create buckets (such as terms or histograms).

Counts are approximateedit

Computing exact counts requires loading values into a hash set and returning its size. This doesn’t scale when working on high-cardinality sets and/or large values as the required memory usage and the need to communicate those per-shard sets between nodes would utilize too many resources of the cluster.

This cardinality aggregation is based on the HyperLogLog++ algorithm, which counts based on the hashes of the values with some interesting properties:

• configurable precision, which decides on how to trade memory for accuracy,
• excellent accuracy on low-cardinality sets,
• fixed memory usage: no matter if there are tens or billions of unique values, memory usage only depends on the configured precision.

For a precision threshold of c, the implementation that we are using requires about c * 8 bytes.

The following chart shows how the error varies before and after the threshold:

For all 3 thresholds, counts have been accurate up to the configured threshold (although not guaranteed, this is likely to be the case). Please also note that even with a threshold as low as 100, the error remains under 5%, even when counting millions of items.

 

　　其意思就是：聚合查询存在误差，在5%范围之内，通过调整“precision_threshold”参数进行调整。

　　于是翻阅查询代码：加入如下部分问题得到解决。该参数在查询时未设置的情况下，默认值为3000。

　　

 private void buildSearchQueryForAgg(NativeSearchQueryBuilder nativeSearchQueryBuilder) {
        // 设置聚合条件
        TermsBuilder agg = AggregationBuilders.terms(aggreName).field(XXX.XXX).size(Integer.MAX_VALUE);

        // 查询条件构建
        BoolQueryBuilder packBoolQuery = QueryBuilders.boolQuery();
        FilterAggregationBuilder packAgg = AggregationBuilders.filter(xxx).filter(packBoolQuery);

        packAgg.subAggregation(AggregationBuilders.cardinality(xxx).field(ZZZZ.XXX).precisionThreshold(CARDINALITY_PRECISION_THRESHOLD));//指定精度值
        agg.subAggregation(packAgg);

        nativeSearchQueryBuilder.addAggregation(agg);
    }