English

Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs (extended version)

Databases 2021-03-30 v1

Abstract

In many data analysis applications, there is a need to explain why a surprising or interesting result was produced by a query. Previous approaches to explaining results have directly or indirectly used data provenance (input tuples contributing to the result(s) of interest), which is limited by the fact that relevant information for explaining an answer may not be fully contained in the provenance. We propose a new approach for explaining query results by augmenting provenance with information from other related tables in the database. We develop a suite of optimization techniques, and demonstrate experimentally using real datasets and through a user study that our approach produces meaningful results by efficiently navigating the large search space of possible explanations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.15797,
  title  = {Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs (extended version)},
  author = {Chenjie Li and Zhengjie Miao and Qitian Zeng and Boris Glavic and Sudeepa Roy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.15797},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

technical report(32 pages), main paper to appear in SIGMOD 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:39:38.081Z