Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization

Summary: BOExplain treats inference-query explanation as black-box optimization, searching for predicates whose tuple removal most changes an unexpected aggregate result. Bayesian optimization, with categorical-variable encoding and warm starts, explains effects rooted in source, training, or inference data. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 12620
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.7465524e-05
Overall Rank: 6,884 | 52.78%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476304

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Brandon Lockhart (Simon Fraser University)
2. Jinglin Peng (Simon Fraser University)
3. Weiyuan Wu (Simon Fraser University)
4. Jiannan Wang (Simon Fraser University)
5. Eugene Wu (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lockhart_vldb21,
        title = {{Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization}},
        author = {Lockhart, Brandon and Peng, Jinglin and Wu, Weiyuan and Wang, Jiannan and Wu, Eugene},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2576--2585},
        doi = {10.14778/3476249.3476304},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476304},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,876	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	6.4687705e-05
10,991	Stress-Testing ML Pipelines with Adversarial Data Corruption	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,098	SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-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
191	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.00026096009
663	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00015174751
798	DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases	2016	SIGMOD	0.00013919795
915	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.00013243386
1,694	PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance	2012	VLDB	9.9953156e-05
1,792	MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data	2017	SIGMOD	9.7436856e-05
1,943	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB	9.440636e-05
2,161	DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation	2019	VLDB	9.0606664e-05
2,195	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.9713779e-05
2,356	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.7015517e-05
2,584	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.3783546e-05
2,759	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	8.1577506e-05
3,190	Looking for Trouble: Analyzing Classifier Behavior via Pattern Divergence	2021	SIGMOD	7.6532441e-05
4,638	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.5919801e-05
6,414	Prediction Cubes	2005	VLDB	5.883228e-05
9,418	BugDoc: A System for Debugging Computational Pipelines	2020	SIGMOD	5.2732157e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	5,456	InferDB: In-Database Machine Learning Inference Using Indexes	2024	VLDB
2	3,698	Optimizing MPF Queries: Decision Support and Probabilistic Inference	2007	SIGMOD
3	5,396	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
4	5,132	Facilitating SQL Query Composition and Analysis	2020	SIGMOD
5	10,825	Explaining Black-Box Clustering Pipelines With Cluster-Explorer	2025	VLDB
6	11,023	Opening The Black-Box: Explaining Learned Cost Models For Databases	2025	VLDB
7	295	Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD
8	2,195	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB
9	663	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
10	8,163	Learned Offline Query Planning via Bayesian Optimization	2025	SIGMOD