Understanding Cardinality Estimation using Entropy Maximization

Summary: Principled MaxEnt framework for cardinality estimation: treat given query statistics as constraints on a distribution over possible worlds and pick the maximum-entropy model. Develops the mathematical tools to apply MaxEnt to predict conjunctive-query cardinalities, enabling systematic inference from arbitrary statistical assertions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1506
Venue: PODS
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 6.0636893e-05
Overall Rank: 5,860 | 59.80%
DOI: 10.1145/1807085.1807095

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christopher Ré (University of Wisconsin)
2. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{re_pods10,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '10},
        title = {{Understanding Cardinality Estimation using Entropy Maximization}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1807085.1807095},
        doi = {10.1145/1807085.1807095},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ré, Christopher and Suciu, Dan},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,170	QuickSel: Quick Selectivity Learning with Mixture Models	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011827259
2,369	Data Generation using Declarative Constraints	2011	SIGMOD	8.682429e-05
8,191	Probabilistic Database Summarization for Interactive Data Exploration	2017	VLDB	5.4699738e-05
10,151	Coresets for Robust Query Optimization	2026	PODS	5.093636e-05
12,183	Online Ordering of Overlapping Data Sources	2014	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
89	On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results	1991	SIGMOD	0.00035031529
100	LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer	2001	VLDB	0.00034385207
101	Selectivity Estimation Without the Attribute Value Independence Assumption	1997	VLDB	0.00034376651
125	Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage	2005	CIDR	0.00030932014
257	The History of Histograms (abridged)	2003	VLDB	0.00023154793
280	Selectivity Estimation using Probabilistic Models	2001	SIGMOD	0.00022454217
418	Tracking Join and Self-Join Sizes in Limited Storage	1999	PODS	0.00018812821
1,041	The Dichotomy of Conjunctive Queries on Probabilistic Structures	2007	PODS	0.00012453494
1,520	Conditioning Probabilistic Databases	2008	VLDB	0.00010510496
1,936	Consistently Estimating the Selectivity of Conjuncts of Predicates	2005	VLDB	9.4557372e-05
7,554	Consistent Histograms In The Presence of Distinct Value Counts	2009	VLDB	5.6001388e-05

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2	1,122	Cardinality Estimation in DBMS: A Comprehensive Benchmark Evaluation	2022	VLDB
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