From Logs to Causal Inference: Diagnosing Large Systems

Summary: LOGos converts messy system logs into causal-inference tables, with interactive cause ranking and causal-graph refinement. Eliciting only graph structure relevant to a target effect reduces human judgments while enabling unbiased intervention estimates. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: h33389f787212ee29
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 5.0596605e-05
Overall Rank: 10,207 | 31.38%
DOI: 10.14778/3705829.3705836

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Markos Markakis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. Brit Youngmann (Technion)
3. Trinity Gao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
4. Ziyu Zhang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Rana Shahout (Harvard University)
6. Peter Baile Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
7. Chunwei Liu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
8. Ibrahim Sabek (University of Southern California)
9. Michael Cafarella (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

BibTeX Citation

@article{markakis_vldb25,
        title = {{From Logs to Causal Inference: Diagnosing Large Systems}},
        author = {Markakis, Markos and Youngmann, Brit and Gao, Trinity and Zhang, Ziyu and Shahout, Rana and Chen, Peter Baile and Liu, Chunwei and Sabek, Ibrahim and Cafarella, Michael},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '25},
        volume = {18},
        number = {2},
        pages = {158--172},
        doi = {10.14778/3705829.3705836},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3705829.3705836},
        year = {2025}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,231	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB	5.2056825e-05
10,688	Stress-Testing Causal Claims via Cardinality Repairs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9793485e-05
11,303	LLMLog: Advanced Log Template Generation via LLM-driven Multi-Round Annotation	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
748	Palimpzest: Optimizing AI-Powered Analytics with Declarative Query Processing	2025	CIDR	0.00014281926
2,353	Bias in OLAP Queries: Detection, Explanation, and Removal (Or Think Twice About Your AVG-Query)	2018	SIGMOD	8.5902514e-05
2,719	TPC-DS, Taking Decision Support Benchmarking to the Next Level	2002	SIGMOD	8.0967665e-05
4,566	HYPER: Hypothetical Reasoning With What-If and How-To Queries Using a Probabilistic Causal Approach	2022	SIGMOD	6.5310568e-05
4,609	ExplainIt! - A Declarative Root-cause Analysis Engine for Time Series Data	2019	SIGMOD	6.503039e-05
4,982	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	6.328859e-05
6,051	A Demonstration of Interactive Analysis of Performance Measurements with Viska	2017	SIGMOD	5.9029287e-05
6,183	Causal Data Integration	2023	VLDB	5.8587542e-05
6,873	Consistent Range Approximation for Fair Predictive Modeling	2023	VLDB	5.6591328e-05
7,925	Runtime Variation in Big Data Analytics	2023	SIGMOD	5.4256585e-05

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1	3,449	Robust and Transferable Log-based Anomaly Detection	2023	SIGMOD
2	14,140	Mapping Moving Landscapes by Mining Mountains of Logs: Novel Techniques for Dependency Model Generation	2006	VLDB
3	7,183	DataPrism: Exposing Disconnect between Data and Systems	2022	SIGMOD
4	6,699	Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality	2022	VLDB
5	5,838	PreLog: A Pre-trained Model for Log Analytics	2024	SIGMOD
6	11,345	What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases	2025	VLDB
7	2,315	Causal Relational Learning	2020	SIGMOD
8	9,231	Causal DAG Summarization	2025	VLDB
9	6,183	Causal Data Integration	2023	VLDB
10	11,141	CausaLens: A System for Summarizing Causal DAGs	2025	SIGMOD