English

The Shapley Value of Tuples in Query Answering

Databases 2023-06-22 v5

Abstract

We investigate the application of the Shapley value to quantifying the contribution of a tuple to a query answer. The Shapley value is a widely known numerical measure in cooperative game theory and in many applications of game theory for assessing the contribution of a player to a coalition game. It has been established already in the 1950s, and is theoretically justified by being the very single wealth-distribution measure that satisfies some natural axioms. While this value has been investigated in several areas, it received little attention in data management. We study this measure in the context of conjunctive and aggregate queries by defining corresponding coalition games. We provide algorithmic and complexity-theoretic results on the computation of Shapley-based contributions to query answers; and for the hard cases we present approximation algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.08679,
  title  = {The Shapley Value of Tuples in Query Answering},
  author = {Ester Livshits and Leopoldo Bertossi and Benny Kimelfeld and Moshe Sebag},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.08679},
  year   = {2023}
}