A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries

Summary: Formal, intervention-based explanations for SQL query results, modeling how tuple deletions alter outputs under foreign-key interactions. Recursive rules compute interventions with polynomial data complexity; SQL-based top-K explanations under practical conditions, evaluated on real datasets. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4783
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 0.00015155714
Overall Rank: 942 | 93.45%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2588578

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sudeepa Roy
2. Dan Suciu

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 67 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,449	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	0.0001193267
2,104	Data Polygamy: The Many-Many Relationships among Urban Spatio-Temporal Data Sets	2016	SIGMOD	9.536298e-05
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
2,566	Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments	2019	PODS	8.5243847e-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
3,299	SCODED: Statistical Constraint Oriented Data Error Detection	2020	SIGMOD	7.2546659e-05
4,361	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.2559141e-05
4,664	Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries	2022	SIGMOD	6.0127053e-05
4,851	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB	5.8768322e-05
4,872	Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research	2022	SIGMOD	5.8609352e-05
4,937	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	5.8187108e-05
5,128	CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing	2019	VLDB	5.6758584e-05
5,191	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	5.6378768e-05
5,222	Enabling SQL-based Training Data Debugging for Federated Learning	2022	VLDB	5.6210545e-05
5,313	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	5.573009e-05
5,418	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	5.5178123e-05
5,445	QFix: Diagnosing Errors through Query Histories	2017	SIGMOD	5.5020909e-05
5,691	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	5.3684557e-05
5,733	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	5.3483446e-05
5,934	Perturbation Analysis of Database Queries	2016	VLDB	5.266698e-05
6,475	Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets	2019	VLDB	5.0497183e-05
6,565	Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality	2022	VLDB	5.0081626e-05
6,662	Selective Provenance for Datalog Programs Using Top-K Queries	2015	VLDB	4.9704872e-05
6,696	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	4.9581958e-05
6,779	Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization	2021	VLDB	4.9280116e-05
7,022	A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations	2023	SIGMOD	4.8576599e-05
7,066	On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs	2020	SIGMOD	4.8445108e-05
7,172	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD	4.8114797e-05
7,364	ExplainED: Explanations for EDA Notebooks	2020	VLDB	4.7519211e-05
7,556	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD	4.7117814e-05
7,922	Video-zilla: An Indexing Layer for Large-Scale Video Analytics	2022	SIGMOD	4.615892e-05
8,388	FEDEX: An Explainability Framework for Data Exploration Steps	2022	VLDB	4.5297787e-05
8,394	Hypothetical Reasoning via Provenance Abstraction	2019	SIGMOD	4.527807e-05
8,531	Sommelier: Curating DNN Models for the Masses	2022	SIGMOD	4.4937074e-05
8,685	NLC: Search Correlated Window Pairs on Long Time Series	2022	VLDB	4.4675898e-05
8,721	Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers	2021	VLDB	4.4608778e-05
8,830	LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers	2019	VLDB	4.4404336e-05
8,886	Provenance-based Data Skipping	2022	VLDB	4.4279829e-05
8,954	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	4.4221863e-05
9,179	Equivalence-Invariant Algebraic Provenance for Hyperplane Update Queries	2020	SIGMOD	4.3820222e-05
9,533	TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series	2021	SIGMOD	4.3269636e-05
9,644	Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset	2025	SIGMOD	4.3109001e-05
9,703	CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context	2022	VLDB	4.3005882e-05
9,766	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	4.2856106e-05
9,847	Discovering Top-k Relevant and Diversified Rules	2024	SIGMOD	4.2721228e-05
9,849	Reptile: Aggregation-level Explanations for Hierarchical Data	2022	SIGMOD	4.2721228e-05
10,101	Privacy-preserving and Verifiable Causal Prescriptive Analytics	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 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
1,000	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.00014709252
1,119	The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers	2011	VLDB	0.0001386199
1,534	PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance	2012	VLDB	0.00011468393
1,623	Scalable Techniques for Mining Causal Structures	1998	VLDB	0.00011102927
1,699	Sensitivity Analysis and Explanations for Robust Query Evaluation in Probabilistic Databases	2011	SIGMOD	0.00010858983
2,602	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4667197e-05
2,610	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.4571036e-05
2,852	MRI: Meaningful Interpretations of Collaborative Ratings	2011	VLDB	8.0151391e-05
3,242	Explanation-Based Auditing	2012	VLDB	7.3301779e-05

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431	On the Complexity of Database Queries (Extended Abstract)	1997	PODS	0.00023370207
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7,556	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD	4.7117814e-05
6,779	Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization	2021	VLDB	4.9280116e-05
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