Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization

Summary: BOExplain treats inference-query explanation as black-box optimization, searching for predicates whose tuple removal most changes an unexpected aggregate result. Bayesian optimization, with categorical-variable encoding and warm starts, explains effects rooted in source, training, or inference data. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hbe9735e763d3401f
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.6177289e-05
Overall Rank: 7,028 | 52.75%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476304

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Brandon Lockhart (Simon Fraser University)
2. Jinglin Peng (Simon Fraser University)
3. Weiyuan Wu (Simon Fraser University)
4. Jiannan Wang (Simon Fraser University)
5. Eugene Wu (Columbia University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{lockhart_vldb21,
        title = {{Explaining Inference Queries with Bayesian Optimization}},
        author = {Lockhart, Brandon and Peng, Jinglin and Wu, Weiyuan and Wang, Jiannan and Wu, Eugene},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2576--2585},
        doi = {10.14778/3476249.3476304},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476304},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
4,982	XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality	2023	SIGMOD	6.328859e-05
11,368	Stress-Testing ML Pipelines with Adversarial Data Corruption	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05
11,450	SDEcho: Efficient Explanation of Aggregated Sequence Difference	2025	VLDB	4.9793485e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 16 of 16 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
189	Scorpion: Explaining Away Outliers in Aggregate Queries	2013	VLDB	0.00025840026
670	A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries	2014	SIGMOD	0.00014954494
782	DBSherlock: A Performance Diagnostic Tool for Transactional Databases	2016	SIGMOD	0.00014022168
925	Intelligent Rollups in Multidimensional OLAP Data	2001	VLDB	0.00013051939
1,708	PerfXplain: Debugging MapReduce Job Performance	2012	VLDB	9.8224587e-05
1,833	MacroBase: Prioritizing Attention in Fast Data	2017	SIGMOD	9.5405247e-05
1,981	Causality and Explanations in Databases	2014	VLDB	9.2586863e-05
2,160	DIFF: A Relational Interface for Large-Scale Data Explanation	2019	VLDB	8.9364035e-05
2,222	Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases	2016	VLDB	8.8109051e-05
2,402	i3: Intelligent, Interactive Investigation of OLAP data cubes	2000	SIGMOD	8.5189151e-05
2,598	Complaint-driven Training Data Debugging for Query 2.0	2020	SIGMOD	8.2385793e-05
2,686	Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors	2015	SIGMOD	8.1308928e-05
3,262	Looking for Trouble: Analyzing Classifier Behavior via Pattern Divergence	2021	SIGMOD	7.4815294e-05
4,739	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4441962e-05
6,543	Prediction Cubes	2005	VLDB	5.7519742e-05
9,599	BugDoc: A System for Debugging Computational Pipelines	2020	SIGMOD	5.1549025e-05

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