For a long time in the area of design and analysis of algorithms, when we have said that an algorithm is efficient we meant that it runs in time polynomial in the input size n and finding a linear time algorithm have been considered as the most efficient way to solve a problem. It’s been because of this assumption that we need at least to consider and read all the input to solve the problem. This way it seems that we cannot do much better! But nowadays the data sets are growing fast in various areas and applications in a way that it hardly fits in storage and in this case even linear time is prohibitive. To work with this massive amount of data, the traditional notions of an efficient algorithm is not sufficient anymore and we need to design more efficient algorithms and data structures. This encourages researchers to ask whether it is possible to solve the problems using just sublinear amount of resources? what does that mean exactly when we say ‘sublinear resources’?
We can think of sublinear algorithms in the area of big data in three different categories:

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