In many applications, such as filtering queries to a data store (Figure 1), the Bloom filter will start out empty and fill as items are added to the data store

In many applications, such as filtering queries to a data store (Figure 1), the Bloom filter will start out empty and fill as items are added to the data store and inserted into the Bloom filter. The false positive rate will be very low and then increase non-linearly as the Bloom filter fills. The average false positive rate over the life of the filter is much lower than the design false positive rate for the full filter given by the math.