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The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers

Summary: Adapts Halpern-Pearl-Chockler causality to define causes and responsibility for answers and non-answers, with ranking. Conjunctive-query causes are PTIME; responsibility has a PTIME/NP-complete dichotomy with max-flow in PTIME and LOGSPACE-hardness. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
10454
Venue
VLDB
Year
2011
Pagerank
0.00015839628
Overall Rank
605 | 95.86%
DOI
10.14778/1880172.1880176

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{meliou_vldb11,
        title = {{The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers}},
        author = {Meliou, Alexandra and Gatterbauer, Wolfgang and Moore, Katherine F. and Suciu, Dan},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '11},
        volume = {4},
        number = {1},
        pages = {34--45},
        doi = {10.14778/1880172.1880176},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1880172.1880176},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 53 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
663 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00015174751
806 Provenance for Aggregate Queries 2011 PODS 0.00013890398
1,594 Sensitivity Analysis and Explanations for Robust Query Evaluation in Probabilistic Databases 2011 SIGMOD 0.00010252583
2,195 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.9713779e-05
2,342 Query-Based Data Pricing 2012 PODS 8.7217471e-05
2,374 Causal Relational Learning 2020 SIGMOD 8.6755064e-05
2,424 Computing the Shapley Value of Facts in Query Answering 2022 SIGMOD 8.6009068e-05
2,432 Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality 2011 SIGMOD 8.5870067e-05
2,436 Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins 2020 SIGMOD 8.5806427e-05
2,565 Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments 2019 PODS 8.4116912e-05
2,570 Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles 2015 SIGMOD 8.4061164e-05
2,663 Partial Results in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 8.2818137e-05
2,670 The Impact of Negation on the Complexity of the Shapley Value in Conjunctive Queries 2020 PODS 8.2737143e-05
2,759 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.1577506e-05
2,914 Reverse Data Management 2011 VLDB 7.9667467e-05
3,991 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.9695922e-05
4,248 Multi-Tuple Deletion Propagation: Approximations and Complexity 2013 VLDB 6.8052749e-05
4,638 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 6.5919801e-05
4,670 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 6.5734205e-05
4,747 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.5252099e-05
4,805 Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries 2022 SIGMOD 6.5003306e-05
4,876 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.4687705e-05
4,901 Maximizing Conjunctive Views in Deletion Propagation 2011 PODS 6.4528526e-05
5,278 Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals 2023 VLDB 6.2856584e-05
5,441 Fast Shapley Value Computation in Data Assemblage Tasks as Cooperative Simple Games 2024 SIGMOD 6.2184806e-05
5,660 Banzhaf Values for Facts in Query Answering 2024 SIGMOD 6.1305635e-05
5,824 ShapGraph: An Holistic View of Explanations through Provenance Graphs and Shapley Values 2022 SIGMOD 6.0750989e-05
5,905 A Dichotomy in the Complexity of Deletion Propagation with Functional Dependencies 2012 PODS 6.0461963e-05
6,272 On Shapley Value in Data Assemblage Under Independent Utility 2022 VLDB 5.9319813e-05
6,354 On Data-Aware Global Explainability of Graph Neural Networks 2023 VLDB 5.9027055e-05
6,358 On Provenance Minimization 2011 PODS 5.9020113e-05
6,461 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.8718966e-05
6,932 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 5.7362362e-05
7,269 A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations 2023 SIGMOD 5.6595955e-05
8,598 Is Integer Linear Programming All You Need for Deletion Propagation? A Unified and Practical Approach for Generalized Deletion Propagation 2025 VLDB 5.4049137e-05
8,688 Advancing Fact Attribution for Query Answering: Aggregate Queries and Novel Algorithms 2025 VLDB 5.3847009e-05
8,700 Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers 2021 VLDB 5.3829336e-05
8,719 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 5.3774243e-05
9,773 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 5.2209769e-05
9,809 Shapley Revisited: Tractable Responsibility Measures for Query Answers 2025 PODS 5.214913e-05
10,183 Tractability Frontiers of the Shapley Value for Aggregate Conjunctive Queries 2026 PODS 5.093636e-05
10,391 Privacy-preserving and Verifiable Causal Prescriptive Analytics 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,436 Causal Explanations for Disparate Trends: Where and Why? 2026 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
10,557 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 5.093636e-05
10,958 What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
10,979 Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,069 Versatile Property Graph Transformations 2025 VLDB 5.093636e-05
11,131 Postulates for Provenance: Instance-based provenance for first-order logic 2024 PODS 5.093636e-05
11,157 Relative Keys: Putting Feature Explanation into Context 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
11,170 Counterfactual Explanation at Will, with Zero Privacy Leakage 2024 SIGMOD 5.093636e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
17 Provenance Semirings 2007 PODS 0.00059843817
385 Why Not? 2009 SIGMOD 0.00019455743
574 Management of Probabilistic Data: Foundations and Challenges 2007 PODS 0.00016278855
628 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00015630285
856 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013573466
2,358 Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers 2009 VLDB 8.6996414e-05
2,831 Secondary-Storage Confidence Computation for Conjunctive Queries with Inequalities 2009 SIGMOD 8.0788784e-05
3,942 On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances 2008 PODS 7.0063604e-05
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