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: 5.7031717e-05
Overall Rank: 6,703 | 54.95%
DOI: 10.14778/3554821.3554902
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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
5,359	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.1608586e-05
6,484	On Data-Aware Global Explainability of Graph Neural Networks	2023	VLDB	5.767533e-05
9,241	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB	5.2032182e-05
9,957	Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset	2025	SIGMOD	5.1014161e-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	0.00059813669
190	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.0002582857
588	Computing Iceberg Queries Efficiently	1998	VLDB	0.00015899635
671	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014948069
754	Profiling, What-if Analysis, and Cost-based Optimization of MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.00014231311
811	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013746145
878	Interpretable and Informative Explanations of Outcomes	2015	VLDB	0.00013296412
1,051	Tiresias: The Database Oracle for How-To Queries	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012274277
1,362	Computing Optimal Repairs for Functional Dependencies	2018	PODS	0.00010912749
1,855	Hypothetical Queries in an OLAP Environment	2000	VLDB	9.4960532e-05
1,941	Caravan: Provisioning for What-If Analysis	2013	CIDR	9.3276626e-05
2,222	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.8106741e-05
2,318	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	8.6491185e-05
2,488	Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins	2020	SIGMOD	8.3933335e-05
4,568	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.5279657e-05
4,731	Interactive Summarization and Exploration of Top Aggregate Query Answers	2018	VLDB	6.4440072e-05
4,741	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4411456e-05
4,849	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3794032e-05
5,152	CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing	2019	VLDB	6.2498545e-05
5,533	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.0906707e-05
5,866	Properties of Inconsistency Measures for Databases	2021	SIGMOD	5.96357e-05
6,113	iQCAR: inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Data Analytics Frameworks	2019	SIGMOD	5.880013e-05
6,734	On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs	2020	SIGMOD	5.6919385e-05
7,152	Learning to Sample: Counting with Complex Queries	2020	VLDB	5.5959861e-05
7,207	QAGView: Interactively Summarizing High-Valued Aggregate Query Answers	2018	SIGMOD	5.5836855e-05
7,334	Selectivity Functions of Range Queries are Learnable*	2022	SIGMOD	5.5473714e-05
7,385	Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers	2021	VLDB	5.5361635e-05
7,752	I-Rex: An Interactive Relational Query Explainer for SQL	2020	VLDB	5.4580039e-05
8,028	Optimizing Iceberg Queries with Complex Joins	2017	SIGMOD	5.4028948e-05
8,890	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2542808e-05
9,023	LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers	2019	VLDB	5.2349965e-05
9,069	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2265129e-05
10,028	CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context	2022	VLDB	5.0910813e-05
10,118	iQCAR: A Demonstration of an Inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Cluster Computing Frameworks	2018	SIGMOD	5.0765311e-05
12,119	MuSe: Multiple Deletion Semantics for Data Repair	2020	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
12,167	RATest: Explaining Wrong Relational Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	4.9769913e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,318	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD
2	13,890	Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and "Big Data"	2015	PODS
3	11,352	What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases	2025	VLDB
4	4,984	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD
5	6,438	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD
6	2,458	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD
7	5,179	Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research	2022	SIGMOD
8	11,151	CausalExplain: Causal Explanations of Black-box Models with Training Data Subsets	2025	SIGMOD
9	671	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
10	1,983	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB