Computing Query Probability with Incidence Algebras

Summary: Applies Möbius inversion in incidence algebras to compute probabilities of unions of conjunctive queries over tuple-independent PDBs, yielding a simple PTIME algorithm for the class of “safe” queries and FP#P-hardness for all unsafe ones. Shows Möbius-based inclusion–exclusion can compute some safe queries despite unsafe subqueries and uses lattice-theoretic analysis to prove lifted-conditioning approaches are incomplete. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1519
Venue: PODS
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 7.6209731e-05
Overall Rank: 3,229 | 77.85%
DOI: 10.1145/1807085.1807113

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Nilesh Dalvi (Yahoo)
2. Karl Schnaitter (University of California Santa Cruz)
3. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{dalvi_pods10,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '10},
        title = {{Computing Query Probability with Incidence Algebras}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1807085.1807113},
        doi = {10.1145/1807085.1807113},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Dalvi, Nilesh and Schnaitter, Karl and Suciu, Dan},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,248	Multi-Tuple Deletion Propagation: Approximations and Complexity	2013	VLDB	6.8052749e-05
4,301	Read-Once Functions and Query Evaluation in Probabilistic Databases	2010	VLDB	6.7737212e-05
4,680	Probabilistic Databases with MarkoViews	2012	VLDB	6.5675814e-05
5,905	A Dichotomy in the Complexity of Deletion Propagation with Functional Dependencies	2012	PODS	6.0461963e-05
6,527	Queries with Difference on Probabilistic Databases	2011	VLDB	5.8509088e-05
7,306	Local Structure and Determinism in Probabilistic Databases	2012	SIGMOD	5.6499367e-05
7,317	Probabilistic Query Evaluation: The Combined FPRAS Landscape	2023	PODS	5.6466593e-05
7,640	Tractable Lineages on Treelike Instances: Limits and Extensions	2016	PODS	5.5766474e-05
12,250	Provenance-based Dictionary Refinement in Information Extraction	2013	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
50	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00043596705
574	Management of Probabilistic Data: Foundations and Challenges	2007	PODS	0.00016278855
644	The Complexity of Query Reliability	1998	PODS	0.00015367965
1,041	The Dichotomy of Conjunctive Queries on Probabilistic Structures	2007	PODS	0.00012453494
2,831	Secondary-Storage Confidence Computation for Conjunctive Queries with Inequalities	2009	SIGMOD	8.0788784e-05

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