Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization

Summary: BOExplain treats inference-query explanations as black-box optimization and uses Bayesian optimization to discover input-predicate deletions that alter the target result. It introduces two techniques—individual contribution encoding and warm-start for categorical variables—and shows stronger explanations than prior engines on real data; open-source Python package. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12432
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.9280116e-05
Overall Rank: 6,779 | 52.85%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476304

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,313	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	5.573009e-05
10,758	Stress-Testing ML Pipelines with Adversarial Data Corruption	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,875	SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
214	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.0003363692
942	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015155714
1,000	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.00014709252
1,022	DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases	2016	SIGMOD	0.00014614917
1,534	PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance	2012	VLDB	0.00011468393
2,126	MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data	2017	SIGMOD	9.4887794e-05
2,154	DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation	2019	VLDB	9.4208667e-05
2,402	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB	8.8928361e-05
2,610	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.4571036e-05
2,649	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.3719123e-05
2,753	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.1724339e-05
3,105	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	7.5568954e-05
3,162	Looking for Trouble: Analyzing Classifier Behavior via Pattern Divergence	2021	SIGMOD	7.4589576e-05
5,191	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	5.6378768e-05
6,641	Prediction Cubes	2005	VLDB	4.97969e-05
9,220	BugDoc: A System for Debugging Computational Pipelines	2020	SIGMOD	4.3702188e-05

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