bucketed

Bucketed is the adjective derived from bucket, used to describe data, processes, or structures that have been divided into discrete groups or containers called buckets. In data analysis and computing, bucketing refers to the practice of grouping continuous values or entities into a finite number of intervals or categories.

In statistics and data analysis, bucketing is used for discretization and histogram construction. Data points are assigned to bins according to defined boundaries (e.g., 0–9, 10–19). Bucketing simplifies modeling, reduces noise, and can speed certain algorithms, but it can also obscure fine-grained information and introduce edge effects at bin boundaries. Common strategies include equal-width buckets, equal-frequency (quantile) buckets, and logarithmic buckets.

In databases and big data processing, bucketing is a form of data partitioning. A bucketed table is partitioned into a fixed number of buckets by applying a hash function to one or more columns. In systems like Hive and Spark, bucketing can improve join performance and query planning when joining two tables that are bucketed on the same column and have the same number of buckets. However, bucketing is sensitive to data skew and requires maintenance when data distributions change.

In general computing, bucket sort or bucketed sorting is a sorting technique that distributes elements into several buckets and sorts them individually, then concatenates results. It is efficient for uniformly distributed data and small integers.