CentralNotice From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search Not to be confused with Bloom shader effect . Part of a series on Probabilistic data structures Bloom filter Count–min sketch Quotient filter Skip list Random trees Random binary tree Treap Rapidly exploring random tree Related Randomized algorithm Computer science portal v t e A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure , conceived by Burton Howard Bloom in 1970, 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 a "counting" filter); the more elements that are added to the set, the ...