• A space-efficient probabilistic data structure, conceived in 1970 by Burton Howard Bloom, that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. False positive matches are possible, but false negatives are not—in other words, a query returns either “possibly in set” or “definitely not in set.” Elements can be added to the set, but not removed (though this can be addressed with the counting Bloom filter variant); the more items added, the larger the probability of false positives. Bloom proposed the technique for applications where the amount of source data would require an impractically large amount of memory if “conventional” error-free hashing techniques were applied. ← Wikipedia

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