As the information available to lay users through autonomous data sources continues to increase, mediators become important to ensure that the wealth of information available is tapped effectively. A key challenge that these information mediators need to handle is the varying levels of incompleteness in the underlying databases in terms of missing attribute values. Existing approaches such as QPIAD aim to mine and use Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs) to predict and retrieve relevant incomplete tuples. These approaches make independence assumptions about missing values---which critically hobbles their performance when there are tuples containing missing values for multiple correlated attributes. In this paper, we present a principled probabilistic alternative that views an incomplete tuple as defining a distribution over the complete tuples that it stands for. We learn this distribution in terms of Bayes networks. Our approach involves mining "learning" Bayes networks from a sample of the database, and using it to do both imputation (predict a missing value) and query rewriting (retrieve relevant results with incompleteness on the query-constrained attributes, when the data sources are autonomous). We present empirical studies to demonstrate that (i) at higher levels of incompleteness, when multiple attribute values are missing, Bayes networks do provide a significantly higher classification accuracy and (ii) the relevant possible answers retrieved by the queries reformulated using Bayes networks provide higher precision and recall than AFDs while keeping query processing costs manageable.
Work on querying inconsistent databases usually focuses on fixing problems with the query itself @cite_0 @cite_18 . If the query has an empty resultset, or if the query does not include all relevant keywords, it can be automatically augmented to fix those shortcomings. The objective of this work is to deal with shortcomings of the data --- our query rewriting algorithms help retrieve useful tuples even in the presence of multiple missing values in them.
@cite_0 @cite_18
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This article deals with the computation of consistent answers to queries on relational databases that violate primary key constraints. A repair of such inconsistent database is obtained by selecting a maximal number of tuples from each relation without ever selecting two distinct tuples that agree on the primary key. We are interested in the following problem: Given a Boolean conjunctive query q, compute a Boolean first-order (FO) query @j such that for every database db, @j evaluates to true on db if and only if q evaluates to true on every repair of db. Such @j is called a consistent FO rewriting of q. We use novel techniques to characterize classes of queries that have a consistent FO rewriting. In this way, we are able to extend previously known classes and discover new ones. Finally, we use an Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse game to show the non-existence of a consistent FO rewriting for @[email protected]?y(R([email protected]?,y)@?R([email protected]?,c)), where c is a constant and the first coordinate of R is the primary key. We investigate the query evaluation problem for fixed queries over fully dynamic databases where tuples can be inserted or deleted. The task is to design a dynamic data structure that can immediately report the new result of a fixed query after every database update. We consider unions of conjunctive queries (UCQs) and focus on the query evaluation tasks testing (decide whether an input tuple belongs to the query result), enumeration (enumerate, without repetition, all tuples in the query result), and counting (output the number of tuples in the query result). We identify three increasingly restrictive classes of UCQs which we call t-hierarchical, q-hierarchical, and exhaustively q-hierarchical UCQs. Our main results provide the following dichotomies: If the query's homomorphic core is t-hierarchical (q-hierarchical, exhaustively q-hierarchical), then the testing (enumeration, counting) problem can be solved with constant update time and constant testing time (delay, counting time). Otherwise, it cannot be solved with sublinear update time and sublinear testing time (delay, counting time), unless the OV-conjecture and or the OMv-conjecture fails. We also study the complexity of query evaluation in the dynamic setting in the presence of integrity constraints, and we obtain according dichotomy results for the special case of small domain constraints (i.e., constraints which state that all values in a particular column of a relation belong to a fixed domain of constant size).