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: 5.6843134e-05
Overall Rank: 6,718 | 54.97%
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
5,374	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.140487e-05
6,498	On Data-Aware Global Explainability of Graph Neural Networks	2023	VLDB	5.748462e-05
9,265	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB	5.1860131e-05
9,990	Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset	2025	SIGMOD	5.0845476e-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	0.00059660827
191	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.0002578784
591	Computing Iceberg Queries Efficiently	1998	VLDB	0.00015853273
672	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014903109
759	Profiling, What-if Analysis, and Cost-based Optimization of MapReduce Programs	2011	VLDB	0.00014194746
811	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013713646
879	Interpretable and Informative Explanations of Outcomes	2015	VLDB	0.00013255435
1,055	Tiresias: The Database Oracle for How-To Queries	2012	SIGMOD	0.0001225364
1,314	Computing Optimal Repairs for Functional Dependencies	2018	PODS	0.000110547
1,864	Hypothetical Queries in an OLAP Environment	2000	VLDB	9.4653035e-05
1,953	Caravan: Provisioning for What-If Analysis	2013	CIDR	9.297314e-05
2,233	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.7844607e-05
2,328	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD	8.6206869e-05
2,497	Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins	2020	SIGMOD	8.365674e-05
4,577	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.5111757e-05
4,742	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4285195e-05
4,752	Interactive Summarization and Exploration of Top Aggregate Query Answers	2018	VLDB	6.4226993e-05
4,871	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3583165e-05
5,174	CAPE: Explaining Outliers by Counterbalancing	2019	VLDB	6.2291886e-05
5,556	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.0705311e-05
5,879	Properties of Inconsistency Measures for Databases	2021	SIGMOD	5.9438507e-05
6,126	iQCAR: inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Data Analytics Frameworks	2019	SIGMOD	5.8614712e-05
6,753	On Multiple Semantics for Declarative Database Repairs	2020	SIGMOD	5.673161e-05
7,175	Learning to Sample: Counting with Complex Queries	2020	VLDB	5.5779755e-05
7,225	QAGView: Interactively Summarizing High-Valued Aggregate Query Answers	2018	SIGMOD	5.5652224e-05
7,355	Selectivity Functions of Range Queries are Learnable*	2022	SIGMOD	5.529034e-05
7,404	Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers	2021	VLDB	5.5178575e-05
7,766	I-Rex: An Interactive Relational Query Explainer for SQL	2020	VLDB	5.4399564e-05
8,042	Optimizing Iceberg Queries with Complex Joins	2017	SIGMOD	5.3852464e-05
8,910	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2369069e-05
9,044	LensXPlain: Visualizing and Explaining Contributing Subsets for Aggregate Query Answers	2019	VLDB	5.2176863e-05
9,090	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2092307e-05
10,066	CaJaDE: Explaining Query Results by Augmenting Provenance with Context	2022	VLDB	5.074247e-05
10,155	iQCAR: A Demonstration of an Inter-Query Contention Analyzer for Cluster Computing Frameworks	2018	SIGMOD	5.0597449e-05
12,163	MuSe: Multiple Deletion Semantics for Data Repair	2020	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,210	RATest: Explaining Wrong Relational Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	2,328	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD
2	13,930	Computational Thinking, Inferential Thinking and "Big Data"	2015	PODS
3	11,405	What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases	2025	VLDB
4	5,008	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD
5	6,450	Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views	2024	SIGMOD
6	2,459	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD
7	5,201	Explainable AI: Foundations, Applications, Opportunities for Data Management Research	2022	SIGMOD
8	11,210	CausalExplain: Causal Explanations of Black-box Models with Training Data Subsets	2025	SIGMOD
9	672	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD
10	1,989	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB