Sufficient Explanations in Databases and their Connections to Database Repairs

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of sufficient explanations in databases, introducing a sufficiency-degree metric, and connects it to database repairs and causality, providing new computational methods using answer-set programming.

Contribution

It introduces the notion of sufficiency-degree for database explanations and links it to repairs and causality, with a novel computational approach via answer-set programs.

Findings

Defined the sufficiency-degree for database tuples

Connected explanations to database repairs and causality

Developed answer-set programming methods for computation

Abstract

We investigate the notion of sufficient explanation, and a sufficiency-degree as attribution score for database tuples in relation to query answering. We also investigate and exploit connections with database repairs as used for dealing with inconsistent databases; and with causality-based necessary explanations, obtaining new computational results. We show how to use answer-set programs to specify sufficient explanations and compute sufficiency-degrees.