Understanding Cardinality Estimation using Entropy Maximization

Summary: Principled MaxEnt framework for cardinality estimation: treat given query statistics as constraints on a distribution over possible worlds and pick the maximum-entropy model. Develops the mathematical tools to apply MaxEnt to predict conjunctive-query cardinalities, enabling systematic inference from arbitrary statistical assertions. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h8b88e34797b548b6
Venue: PODS
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 5.9306716e-05
Overall Rank: 5,973 | 59.85%
DOI: 10.1145/1807085.1807095

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Christopher Ré (University of Wisconsin)
2. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{re_pods10,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '10},
        title = {{Understanding Cardinality Estimation using Entropy Maximization}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1807085.1807095},
        doi = {10.1145/1807085.1807095},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Ré, Christopher and Suciu, Dan},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,156	QuickSel: Quick Selectivity Learning with Mixture Models	2020	SIGMOD	0.00011777105
2,413	Data Generation using Declarative Constraints	2011	SIGMOD	8.5094338e-05
8,363	Probabilistic Database Summarization for Interactive Data Exploration	2017	VLDB	5.3472423e-05
10,368	Coresets for Robust Query Optimization	2026	PODS	4.9793485e-05
12,474	Online Ordering of Overlapping Data Sources	2014	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
91	On the Propagation of Errors in the Size of Join Results	1991	SIGMOD	0.0003475226
98	LEO - DB2's LEarning Optimizer	2001	VLDB	0.00034106982
103	Selectivity Estimation Without the Attribute Value Independence Assumption	1997	VLDB	0.00033894985
126	Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage	2005	CIDR	0.00030439683
255	The History of Histograms (abridged)	2003	VLDB	0.00022981861
286	Selectivity Estimation using Probabilistic Models	2001	SIGMOD	0.0002211981
428	Tracking Join and Self-Join Sizes in Limited Storage	1999	PODS	0.0001845349
1,065	The Dichotomy of Conjunctive Queries on Probabilistic Structures	2007	PODS	0.0001219981
1,549	Conditioning Probabilistic Databases	2008	VLDB	0.00010288725
1,929	Consistently Estimating the Selectivity of Conjuncts of Predicates	2005	VLDB	9.3546057e-05
7,633	Consistent Histograms In The Presence of Distinct Value Counts	2009	VLDB	5.4792473e-05

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