This would be used to calculate dataset histogram during ingestion. t-digest algorithm is very popular (especially in map-reduce ops in Apache Spark).
Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests (Dunning & Ertl 2019):
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04023
Some light weight explainer:
https://www.gresearch.com/news/approximate-percentiles-with-t-digests
There are two python libraries that do it:
E.g. each distributed worker calculates their part of the data distribution representation. At the end, they would be combined for the final histogram.