Mechanisms are disclosed for estimating cardinality of group-by queries. A probability of occurrence of values is obtained for columns that satisfy the query occurring in tables from a trained machine learning model. A range selectivity is calculated based on a conditional probability of occurrence of the values. A set of valid generated sample tuples is generated from the trained machine learning model. A group-by selectivity is calculated by keeping the conditional probability of occurrence to obtain probabilities that a result set will have specific group-by column values associated with the tables while proceeding with progressive sampling. A sampling probability is calculated by normalizing the group-by selectivity by dividing the group-by selectivity by the range selectivity. The samples are filtered such that the samples having a sampling probability below a sampling probability threshold are filtered out. A sampling-based estimator is applied to the filtered samples set to estimate the cardinality.