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The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers

Summary: Adapts Halpern-Pearl-Chockler causality to define causes and responsibility for answers and non-answers, with ranking. Conjunctive-query causes are PTIME; responsibility has a PTIME/NP-complete dichotomy with max-flow in PTIME and LOGSPACE-hardness. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID
he31a5be5c47e2319
Venue
VLDB
Year
2011
Pagerank
0.00016042765
Overall Rank
581 | 96.11%
DOI
10.14778/1880172.1880176

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

BibTeX Citation

@article{meliou_vldb11,
        title = {{The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers}},
        author = {Meliou, Alexandra and Gatterbauer, Wolfgang and Moore, Katherine F. and Suciu, Dan},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '11},
        volume = {4},
        number = {1},
        pages = {34--45},
        doi = {10.14778/1880172.1880176},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1880172.1880176},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 50 of 55 citing papers.

Rank Citing Paper Year Venue Pagerank
672 A Formal Approach to Finding Explanations for Database Queries 2014 SIGMOD 0.00014903109
811 Provenance for Aggregate Queries 2011 PODS 0.00013713646
1,619 Sensitivity Analysis and Explanations for Robust Query Evaluation in Probabilistic Databases 2011 SIGMOD 0.00010044303
2,233 Explaining Query Answers with Explanation-Ready Databases 2016 VLDB 8.7844607e-05
2,234 Computing the Shapley Value of Facts in Query Answering 2022 SIGMOD 8.7839031e-05
2,328 Causal Relational Learning 2020 SIGMOD 8.6206869e-05
2,399 Query-Based Data Pricing 2012 PODS 8.5059294e-05
2,459 Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality 2011 SIGMOD 8.4137923e-05
2,492 Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles 2015 SIGMOD 8.3722864e-05
2,497 Computing Local Sensitivities of Counting Queries with Joins 2020 SIGMOD 8.365674e-05
2,610 Database Repairs and Consistent Query Answering: Origins and Further Developments 2019 PODS 8.2035758e-05
2,685 Data X-Ray: A Diagnostic Tool for Data Errors 2015 SIGMOD 8.116387e-05
2,730 Partial Results in Database Systems 2014 SIGMOD 8.0676725e-05
2,734 The Impact of Negation on the Complexity of the Shapley Value in Conjunctive Queries 2020 PODS 8.0650095e-05
2,962 Reverse Data Management 2011 VLDB 7.7949147e-05
4,085 The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries 2016 VLDB 6.7989526e-05
4,341 Multi-Tuple Deletion Propagation: Approximations and Complexity 2013 VLDB 6.6408734e-05
4,460 Maximizing Conjunctive Views in Deletion Propagation 2011 PODS 6.5757194e-05
4,742 Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances 2019 SIGMOD 6.4285195e-05
4,769 New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins 2020 PODS 6.4131333e-05
4,865 High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies 2015 PODS 6.3619008e-05
4,943 Efficient Answering of Historical What-if Queries 2022 SIGMOD 6.3304729e-05
5,008 XInsight: eXplainable Data Analysis Through The Lens of Causality 2023 SIGMOD 6.3049458e-05
5,078 ShapGraph: An Holistic View of Explanations through Provenance Graphs and Shapley Values 2022 SIGMOD 6.2706745e-05
5,374 Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals 2023 VLDB 6.140487e-05
5,448 Fast Shapley Value Computation in Data Assemblage Tasks as Cooperative Simple Games 2024 SIGMOD 6.1108214e-05
5,809 Banzhaf Values for Facts in Query Answering 2024 SIGMOD 5.9703658e-05
6,006 A Dichotomy in the Complexity of Deletion Propagation with Functional Dependencies 2012 PODS 5.9002327e-05
6,406 On Shapley Value in Data Assemblage Under Independent Utility 2022 VLDB 5.7790819e-05
6,450 Summarized Causal Explanations For Aggregate Views 2024 SIGMOD 5.7635046e-05
6,472 On Provenance Minimization 2011 PODS 5.7561073e-05
6,498 On Data-Aware Global Explainability of Graph Neural Networks 2023 VLDB 5.748462e-05
6,608 Explain3D: Explaining Disagreements in Disjoint Datasets 2019 VLDB 5.7187078e-05
7,404 Aggregated Deletion Propagation for Counting Conjunctive Query Answers 2021 VLDB 5.5178575e-05
7,443 A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations 2023 SIGMOD 5.5117047e-05
8,788 Is Integer Linear Programming All You Need for Deletion Propagation? A Unified and Practical Approach for Generalized Deletion Propagation 2025 VLDB 5.263678e-05
8,882 Advancing Fact Attribution for Query Answering: Aggregate Queries and Novel Algorithms 2025 VLDB 5.2439934e-05
8,910 DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers 2023 VLDB 5.2369069e-05
9,990 Fair and Actionable Causal Prescription Ruleset 2025 SIGMOD 5.0845476e-05
10,038 Shapley Revisited: Tractable Responsibility Measures for Query Answers 2025 PODS 5.0786422e-05
10,477 Tractability Frontiers of the Shapley Value for Aggregate Conjunctive Queries 2026 PODS 4.9605343e-05
10,660 Privacy-preserving and Verifiable Causal Prescriptive Analytics 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,697 Causal Explanations for Disparate Trends: Where and Why? 2026 SIGMOD 4.9605343e-05
10,810 Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,866 Measuring Database Unfairness via Dependency Quantification Under Differential Privacy 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
10,895 CaSh: Shapley Value Computation with Cache Optimization 2026 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,405 What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,422 Finding Convincing Views to Endorse a Claim 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,487 Versatile Property Graph Transformations 2025 VLDB 4.9605343e-05
11,537 Postulates for Provenance: Instance-based provenance for first-order logic 2024 PODS 4.9605343e-05
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 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
389 Why Not? 2009 SIGMOD 0.00019254758
590 Management of Probabilistic Data: Foundations and Challenges 2007 PODS 0.00015876538
624 On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data 2008 VLDB 0.00015438077
790 How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions 2010 SIGMOD 0.00013929166
2,371 Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers 2009 VLDB 8.5457987e-05
2,869 Secondary-Storage Confidence Computation for Conjunctive Queries with Inequalities 2009 SIGMOD 7.9042921e-05
3,989 On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances 2008 PODS 6.8620001e-05
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