The Cascading Analysts Algorithm

Summary: Cascading Analysts algorithm selects a small, disjoint set of segments on a product of trees to explain most metric change, mirroring a hierarchical analyst workflow. Applied in AdWords/Analytics; guarantees: optimal in 2D; log^(d-2)(n+1) for d>=3; 2-approx in ads; NP-hard via conflicts (lower bound 1.144^(d-2)). (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5527
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2018
Pagerank: 5.4769543e-05
Overall Rank: 8,153 | 44.07%
DOI: 10.1145/3183713.3183745

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Matthias Ruhl (Accompani)
2. Mukund Sundararajan (Google)
3. Qiqi Yan (Google)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{ruhl_sigmod18,
        title = {{The Cascading Analysts Algorithm}},
        author = {Ruhl, Matthias and Sundararajan, Mukund and Yan, Qiqi},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '18},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3183713.3183745},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3183713.3183745},
        year = {2018}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,713	TSExplain: Surfacing Evolving Explanations for Time Series	2021	SIGMOD	5.2342614e-05
10,001	Reptile: Aggregation-level Explanations for Hierarchical Data	2022	SIGMOD	5.1814573e-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
700	Explaining differences in multidimensional aggregates	1999	VLDB	0.00014871032
858	Interpretable and Informative Explanations of Outcomes	2015	VLDB	0.0001356511
965	User-adaptive exploration of multidimensional data	2000	VLDB	0.00012933878
2,356	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.7015517e-05
2,382	The Generalized MDL Approach for Summarization	2002	VLDB	8.6603462e-05
4,204	MDL Summarization with Holes	2005	VLDB	6.834169e-05
4,295	Meet Charles, big data query advisor	2013	CIDR	6.7780208e-05
4,392	Multi-Structural Databases	2005	PODS	6.7288249e-05
6,452	Efficient Implementation of Large-Scale Multi-Structural Databases	2005	VLDB	5.8751532e-05
6,763	Smart Drill-Down: A New Data Exploration Operator	2015	VLDB	5.7810308e-05
7,406	Supporting OLAP Operations over Imperfectly Integrated Taxonomies	2008	SIGMOD	5.6243865e-05

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