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)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Alexandra Meliou (University of Washington)
- 2. Wolfgang Gatterbauer (University of Washington)
- 3. Katherine F. Moore (University of Washington)
- 4. Dan Suciu (University of Washington)
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 5 of 55 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11,504 | Relative Keys: Putting Feature Explanation into Context | 2024 | SIGMOD | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 11,515 | Counterfactual Explanation at Will, with Zero Privacy Leakage | 2024 | SIGMOD | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 11,647 | PD-Explain: A Unified Python-native Framework for Query Explanations Over DataFrames | 2024 | VLDB | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 12,237 | Provenance Summaries for Answers and Non-Answers | 2018 | VLDB | 4.9793485e-05 |
| 12,385 | Looking at Everything in Context | 2015 | CIDR | 4.9793485e-05 |
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 | 0.00059752575 |
| 391 | Why Not? | 2009 | SIGMOD | 0.00019238698 |
| 587 | Management of Probabilistic Data: Foundations and Challenges | 2007 | PODS | 0.00015933201 |
| 622 | On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data | 2008 | VLDB | 0.00015484312 |
| 791 | How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions | 2010 | SIGMOD | 0.00013976192 |
| 2,360 | Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers | 2009 | VLDB | 8.5770202e-05 |
| 2,860 | Secondary-Storage Confidence Computation for Conjunctive Queries with Inequalities | 2009 | SIGMOD | 7.9338024e-05 |
| 3,974 | On the Complexity of Deriving Schema Mappings from Database Instances | 2008 | PODS | 6.8868916e-05 |
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