ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

Benchmarking Progressive Sampling for Data Quality Profiling

other · 2026-07-29

A recent study introduces a new standard that assesses nine innovative sampling techniques aimed at profiling data quality within data-centric AI pipelines. It evaluates both blind methods—such as random uniform, geometric, Yamane, and cluster—and proxy-guided techniques, including Metropolis-Hastings, DAG, stratified, and importance-weighted sampling. The datasets examined encompass NYC 311, NYPD arrests, UCI Adult (up to 500K rows), an IoT sensor stream (2.3M rows), Ultra-Marathon Running (up to 7.4M rows), and synthetic data (5x10^6 rows). Surprisingly, the findings reveal that blind representative samplers consistently surpass proxy-guided methods, regardless of the dataset size.

Key facts

  • Data quality profiling computes missing-value rates, duplicate fractions, outlier densities, and functional-dependency violations.
  • Exhaustive scans over millions of rows are too slow for near-real-time monitoring.
  • Progressive sampling is the standard alternative for data quality profiling.
  • Nine sampling strategies were benchmarked: blind (random uniform, geometric, Yamane, cluster) and proxy-guided (Metropolis-Hastings, DAG, stratified by column type or quality score, importance-weighted).
  • Real-world datasets include NYC 311, NYPD arrests, and UCI Adult (up to 500K rows).
  • An IoT sensor stream dataset contains 2.3 million rows.
  • Ultra-Marathon Running dataset has up to 7.4 million rows.
  • Synthetic data was scaled to 5 million rows.
  • Blind representative samplers dominate uniformly over proxy-guided methods.

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