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: 12433
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 4.9232829e-05
Overall Rank: 6,779 | 52.89%
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
5,321	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	5.5676564e-05
10,764	Stress-Testing ML Pipelines with Adversarial Data Corruption	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,879	SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
213	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.0003371037
943	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015140995
1,001	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.00014709145
1,024	DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases	2016	SIGMOD	0.00014601525
1,533	PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance	2012	VLDB	0.00011462982
2,129	MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data	2017	SIGMOD	9.4799835e-05
2,158	DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation	2019	VLDB	9.4117885e-05
2,400	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB	8.884178e-05
2,614	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.4538942e-05
2,655	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.3638668e-05
2,759	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.1646193e-05
3,107	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	7.5549177e-05
3,170	Looking for Trouble: Analyzing Classifier Behavior via Pattern Divergence	2021	SIGMOD	7.4517805e-05
5,192	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	5.6324589e-05
6,642	Prediction Cubes	2005	VLDB	4.9747342e-05
9,223	BugDoc: A System for Debugging Computational Pipelines	2020	SIGMOD	4.3660299e-05

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