Efficient Approximation of Certain and Possible Answers for Ranking and Window Queries over Uncertain Data

Summary: Efficient under- and over-approximation framework for certain and possible answers to ranking, top-k and—uniquely—windowed aggregation queries over uncertain data. Implements physical operators for uncertain sorting/window in PostgreSQL, integrates with existing uncertain-DB methods, and empirically outperforms prior approaches in speed and accuracy. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h75c68e904342743a
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2023
Pagerank: 5.1672232e-05
Overall Rank: 9,409 | 36.94%
DOI: 10.14778/3583140.3583151
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Su Feng (Illinois Institute of Technology)
2. Boris Glavic (Illinois Institute of Technology)
3. Oliver Kennedy (State University of New York at Buffalo)

BibTeX Citation

@article{feng_vldb23,
        title = {{Efficient Approximation of Certain and Possible Answers for Ranking and Window Queries over Uncertain Data}},
        author = {Feng, Su and Glavic, Boris and Kennedy, Oliver},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '23},
        volume = {16},
        number = {6},
        pages = {1346--1358},
        doi = {10.14778/3583140.3583151},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3583140.3583151},
        year = {2023}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,915	FastPDB: Towards Bag-Probabilistic Queries at Interactive Speeds	2025	SIGMOD	5.2361195e-05
11,170	A Rank-Based Approach to Recommender System’s Top-K Queries with Uncertain Scores	2025	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 21 of 21 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
245	MCDB: A Monte Carlo Approach to Managing Uncertain Data	2008	SIGMOD	0.00023188414
502	Dependencies Revisited for Improving Data Quality	2008	PODS	0.00017239652
811	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013713646
826	Data Integration: The Teenage Years	2006	VLDB	0.00013599086
1,367	A Unified Approach to Ranking in Probabilistic Databases	2009	VLDB	0.00010878876
1,403	Ranking Queries on Uncertain Data: A Probabilistic Threshold Approach	2008	SIGMOD	0.00010753743
1,954	Interpretable Data-Based Explanations for Fairness Debugging	2022	SIGMOD	9.2965173e-05
2,215	OLAP Over Uncertain and Imprecise Data	2005	VLDB	8.8284913e-05
2,730	Partial Results in Database Systems	2014	SIGMOD	8.0676725e-05
4,196	Aggregation in Probabilistic Databases via Knowledge Compilation	2012	VLDB	6.7317801e-05
4,892	Uncertainty Annotated Databases - A Lightweight Approach for Approximating Certain Answers	2019	SIGMOD	6.3507497e-05
5,665	Foundations of Uncertain-Data Integration	2010	VLDB	6.0292508e-05
5,819	Making SQL Queries Correct on Incomplete Databases: A Feasibility Study	2016	PODS	5.9670046e-05
5,997	Querying Uncertain Data with Aggregate Constraints	2011	SIGMOD	5.9036298e-05
6,062	Your notebook is not crumby enough, REPLace it	2020	CIDR	5.8829004e-05
6,103	Lenses: An On-Demand Approach to ETL	2015	VLDB	5.8688925e-05
8,192	Fast and Reliable Missing Data Contingency Analysis with Predicate-Constraints	2020	SIGMOD	5.3646457e-05
8,451	Efficient Uncertainty Tracking for Complex Queries with Attribute-level Bounds	2021	SIGMOD	5.3148581e-05
9,033	Coping with Incomplete Data: Recent Advances	2020	PODS	5.2196086e-05
9,883	SGL: A Scalable Language for Data-Driven Games	2008	SIGMOD	5.1040682e-05

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9	1,403	Ranking Queries on Uncertain Data: A Probabilistic Threshold Approach	2008	SIGMOD
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