Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality

Summary: Research agenda for non-black-box analytics: explanations make results and workflows interpretable and debuggable, while causal counterfactuals and interventions enable actionable decisions. Bridges database, ML, and statistics across education, law, and health. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h1fc32863ddadf5a8
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2022
Pagerank: 5.7058728e-05
Overall Rank: 6,699 | 54.97%
DOI: 10.14778/3554821.3554902

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sudeepa Roy (Duke University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{roy_vldb22,
        title = {{Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality}},
        author = {Roy, Sudeepa},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '22},
        volume = {15},
        number = {12},
        pages = {3812--3820},
        doi = {10.14778/3554821.3554902},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3554821.3554902},
        year = {2022}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,353	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.1637765e-05
6,482	On Data-Aware Global Explainability of Graph Neural Networks	2023	VLDB	5.7702646e-05
9,231	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB	5.2056825e-05
9,949	Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset	2025	SIGMOD	5.1038322e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 36 of 36 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
17	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.00059752575
189	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.00025840026
588	Computing Iceberg Queries Efficiently	1998	VLDB	0.00015906635
670	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014954494
753	Profiling, What-if Analysis, and Cost-based Optimization of MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.00014237583
819	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013666629
878	Interpretable and Informative Explanations of Outcomes	2015	VLDB	0.00013302631
1,051	Tiresias: The Database Oracle for How-To Queries	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012279821
1,361	Computing Optimal Repairs for Functional Dependencies	2018	PODS	0.00010917917
1,853	Hypothetical Queries in an OLAP Environment	2000	VLDB	9.5001964e-05
1,944	Caravan: Provisioning for What-If Analysis	2013	CIDR	9.3281326e-05
2,222	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.8109051e-05
2,315	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	8.6532142e-05
2,488	Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins	2020	SIGMOD	8.3973087e-05
4,566	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.5310568e-05
4,729	Interactive Summarization and Exploration of Top Aggregate Query Answers	2018	VLDB	6.4470592e-05
4,739	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4441962e-05
4,847	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3823876e-05
5,151	CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing	2019	VLDB	6.2528145e-05
5,529	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.0935553e-05
5,864	Properties of Inconsistency Measures for Databases	2021	SIGMOD	5.9663944e-05
6,112	iQCAR: inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Data Analytics Frameworks	2019	SIGMOD	5.8826029e-05
6,728	On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs	2020	SIGMOD	5.6946342e-05
7,166	Learning to Sample: Counting with Complex Queries	2020	VLDB	5.5949741e-05
7,205	QAGView: Interactively Summarizing High-Valued Aggregate Query Answers	2018	SIGMOD	5.58633e-05
7,332	Selectivity Functions of Range Queries are Learnable*	2022	SIGMOD	5.5499953e-05
7,383	Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers	2021	VLDB	5.5387855e-05
7,746	I-Rex: An Interactive Relational Query Explainer for SQL	2020	VLDB	5.4605889e-05
8,023	Optimizing Iceberg Queries with Complex Joins	2017	SIGMOD	5.4054487e-05
8,881	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2567693e-05
9,015	LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers	2019	VLDB	5.2374759e-05
9,061	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2289882e-05
10,023	CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context	2022	VLDB	5.0934925e-05
10,114	iQCAR: A Demonstration of an Inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Cluster Computing Frameworks	2018	SIGMOD	5.0789354e-05
12,113	MuSe: Multiple Deletion Semantics for Data Repair	2020	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
12,161	RATest: Explaining Wrong Relational Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,315	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD
2	13,885	Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and "Big Data"	2015	PODS
3	11,345	What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases	2025	VLDB
4	4,982	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD
5	6,436	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD
6	2,458	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD
7	5,178	Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research	2022	SIGMOD
8	11,142	CausalExplain: Causal Explanations of Black-box Models with Training Data Subsets	2025	SIGMOD
9	670	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
10	1,981	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB