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To Join or Not to Join? Thinking Twice about Joins before Feature Selection

Summary: Safe-join avoidance for feature selection in normalized datasets: many join-derived features can be dropped without hurting ML accuracy. Experiments on real normalized datasets show accurate safety predictions and substantial runtime savings for popular feature selection methods. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
5144
Venue
SIGMOD
Year
2016
Pagerank
0.00015462938
Overall Rank
901 | 93.74%
DOI
10.1145/2882903.2882952

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

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Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 38 of 38 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
1,283 Towards Linear Algebra over Normalized Data 2017 VLDB 0.00012826013
1,422 Data Management Challenges in Production Machine Learning 2017 SIGMOD 0.00012050431
1,462 ARDA: Automatic Relational Data Augmentation for Machine Learning 2020 VLDB 0.00011866333
1,534 Data Management in Machine Learning: Challenges, Techniques, and Systems 2017 SIGMOD 0.00011462072
1,643 Finding Related Tables in Data Lakes for Interactive Data Science 2020 SIGMOD 0.00011031534
1,666 HELIX: Holistic Optimization for Accelerating Iterative Machine Learning 2019 VLDB 0.00010955907
2,158 DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation 2019 VLDB 9.4117885e-05
2,197 Enabling and Optimizing Non-linear Feature Interactions in Factorized Linear Algebra 2019 SIGMOD 9.3117431e-05
3,280 A Layered Aggregate Engine for Analytics Workloads 2019 SIGMOD 7.2813732e-05
3,428 Distributed Join Algorithms on Thousands of Cores 2017 VLDB 7.1002401e-05
3,466 AI Meets Database: AI4DB and DB4AI 2021 SIGMOD 7.0645718e-05
3,754 Data Acquisition for Improving Machine Learning Models 2021 VLDB 6.7830341e-05
3,765 Ember: No-Code Context Enrichment via Similarity-Based Keyless Joins 2022 VLDB 6.7760748e-05
4,123 Are Key-Foreign Key Joins Safe to Avoid when Learning High-Capacity Classifiers? 2018 VLDB 6.4290005e-05
4,394 Scalable Asynchronous Gradient Descent Optimization for Out-of-Core Models 2017 VLDB 6.2173726e-05
4,970 Leva: Boosting Machine Learning Performance with Relational Embedding Data Augmentation 2022 SIGMOD 5.7900867e-05
5,706 Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs 2021 SIGMOD 5.3633001e-05
5,817 BlinkML: Efficient Maximum Likelihood Estimation with Probabilistic Guarantees 2019 SIGMOD 5.3154329e-05
5,974 Rotom: A Meta-Learned Data Augmentation Framework for Entity Matching, Data Cleaning, Text Classification, and Beyond 2021 SIGMOD 5.2458154e-05
6,268 MATE: Multi-Attribute Table Extraction 2022 VLDB 5.1288179e-05
6,329 Efficient Construction of Approximate Ad-Hoc ML models Through Materialization and Reuse 2018 VLDB 5.1030159e-05
6,377 Mitigating the Impedance Mismatch between Prediction Query Execution and Database Engine 2025 SIGMOD 5.0860948e-05
6,535 Tuple-oriented Compression for Large-scale Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent 2019 SIGMOD 5.0184189e-05
7,180 Coresets over Multiple Tables for Feature-rich and Data-efficient Machine Learning 2023 VLDB 4.8032775e-05
7,605 Causal Feature Selection for Algorithmic Fairness 2022 SIGMOD 4.6943015e-05
7,721 Mind the Gap: Bridging Multi-Domain Query Workloads with EmptyHeaded 2017 VLDB 4.6631706e-05
8,121 LakeBench: A Benchmark for Discovering Joinable and Unionable Tables in Data Lakes 2024 VLDB 4.5771143e-05
8,276 Optimizing Data Acquisition to Enhance Machine Learning Performance 2024 VLDB 4.5392079e-05
8,423 SPRINTER: A Fast n-ary Join Query Processing Method for Complex OLAP Queries 2020 SIGMOD 4.5112315e-05
8,651 ApproxML: Efficient Approximate Ad-Hoc ML Models Through Materialization and Reuse 2019 VLDB 4.4710004e-05
8,924 Leveraging Similarity Joins for Signal Reconstruction 2018 VLDB 4.4229886e-05
10,177 InferF: Declarative Factorization of AI/ML Inferences over Joins 2026 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
10,269 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,038 Relational Query Synthesis ⋈ Decision Tree Learning 2024 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,057 Enriching Relations with Additional Attributes for ER 2024 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
11,189 Regularized Pairwise Relationship based Analytics for Structured Data 2023 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,480 Enforcing Constraints for Machine Learning Systems via Declarative Feature Selection: An Experimental Study 2021 SIGMOD 4.1905499e-05
11,750 Learning Efficiently Over Heterogeneous Databases 2018 VLDB 4.1905499e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 cited papers.

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

Rank Cited Paper Year Venue Pagerank
139 The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL 2012 VLDB 0.00042320525
543 MLbase: A Distributed Machine-learning System 2013 CIDR 0.0002050918
679 Skew-Aware Automatic Database Partitioning in Shared-Nothing, Parallel OLTP Systems 2012 SIGMOD 0.00018211621
758 Materialization Optimizations for Feature Selection Workloads 2014 SIGMOD 0.00017053915
1,165 Simulation of Database-Valued Markov Chains Using SimSQL 2013 SIGMOD 0.00013567206
1,172 Learning Generalized Linear Models Over Normalized Data 2015 SIGMOD 0.00013504249
2,919 Brainwash: A Data System for Feature Engineering 2013 CIDR 7.9017482e-05
7,270 Feature Selection in Enterprise Analytics: A Demonstration using an R-based Data Analytics System 2013 VLDB 4.776491e-05
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