Operational consistent query answering (CQA) is a recent framework for CQA, based on revised definitions of repairs and consistent answers, which opens up the possibility of efficient approximations with explicit error guarantees. The main idea is to iteratively apply operations (e.g., fact deletions), starting from an inconsistent database, until we reach a database that is consistent w.r.t. the given set of constraints. This gives us the flexibility of choosing the probability with which we apply an operation, which in turn allows us to calculate the probability of an operational repair, and thus, the probability with which a consistent answer is entailed. A natural way of assigning probabilities to operations is by targeting the uniform probability distribution over a reasonable space such as the set of operational repairs, the set of sequences of operations that lead to an operational repair, and the set of available operations at a certain step of the repairing process. This leads to what we generally call uniform operational CQA. The goal of this work is to perform a data complexity analysis of both exact and approximate uniform operational CQA, focusing on functional dependencies (and subclasses thereof) and conjunctive queries. The main outcome of our analysis, among other positive and negative results, is that uniform operational CQA pushes the efficiency boundaries further by ensuring the existence of efficient approximation schemes in scenarios that go beyond the simple case of primary keys, which seems to be the limit of the classical approach to CQA.

Datasets often contain values that naturally reside in a metric space: numbers, strings, geographical locations, machine-learned embeddings in a vector space, and so on. We study the computational complexity of repairing inconsistent databases that violate integrity constraints, where the database values belong to an underlying metric space. The goal is to update the database values to retain consistency while minimizing the total distance between the original values and the repaired ones. We consider what we refer to as coincidence constraints, which include unary key constraints, inclusion constraints, foreign keys, and generally any restriction on the relationship between the numbers of cells of different labels (attributes) coinciding in a single value, for a fixed attribute set. We begin by showing that the problem is APX-hard for general metric spaces. We then present an algorithm solving the problem optimally for tree metrics, which generalize both the line metric (i.e., where repaired values are numbers) and the discrete metric (i.e., where we simply count the number of changed values). Combining our algorithm for tree metrics and a classic result on probabilistic tree embeddings, we design a (high probability) logarithmic-ratio approximation for general metrics. We also study the variant of the problem where we limit the allowed change of each individual value. In this variant, it is already NP-complete to decide the existence of any legal repair for a general metric, and we present a polynomial-time repairing algorithm for the case of a line metric.

Datalog is a powerful rule-based language that allows us to express complex recursive queries and has found numerous applications over the years. Explaining why a result to a Datalog query is obtained is an essential task towards explainable and transparent data-intensive applications that rely on Datalog. A standard way of explaining a query result is the so-called why-provenance, which provides information about the witnesses to a query result in the form of subsets of the input database that as a whole can be used to derive that result. To our surprise, despite the fact that the notion of why-provenance for Datalog queries has been around for decades and intensively studied, its computational complexity remains unexplored. Our goal is to fill this gap in the why-provenance literature. Towards this end, we pinpoint the data complexity of why-provenance for Datalog queries and key subclasses thereof. The takeaway of our work is that why-provenance for recursive queries, even if the recursion is limited to be linear, is an intractable problem, whereas for non-recursive queries is highly tractable.

Operational consistent query answering (CQA) is a recent framework for CQA based on revised definitions of repairs, which are built by applying a sequence of operations (e.g., fact deletions) starting from an inconsistent database until we reach a database that is consistent w.r.t. the given set of constraints. It has been recently shown that there is an efficient approximation for computing the percentage of repairs that entail a given query when we focus on primary keys, conjunctive queries, and assuming the query is fixed (i.e., in data complexity). However, it has been left open whether such an approximation exists when the query is part of the input (i.e., in combined complexity). We show that this is the case when we focus on self-join-free conjunctive queries of bounded generelized hypertreewidth. We also show that it is unlikely that efficient approximation schemes exist once we give up one of the adopted syntactic restrictions, i.e., self-join-freeness or bounding the generelized hypertreewidth. Towards the desired approximation, we introduce a counting complexity class, called SpanTL, show that each problem in it admits an efficient approximation scheme by using a recent approximability result about tree automata, and then place the problem of interest in SpanTL.

Datalog is a well-established rule-based language that allows us to express complex recursive queries. As for every other query language, explaining why a result to a Datalog query is obtained is an essential task towards explainable and transparent query evaluation. A standard way of explaining a query result is the so-called why-provenance, which provides information about the witnesses to a query result in the form of subsets of the input database that as a whole can be used to derive that result. The data complexity of why-provenance for Datalog queries has been recently studied and it was shown to be intractable, namely NP-complete even if the recursion is linear. An interesting question that comes up is whether we can ensure tractable data complexity by considering a slightly less informative notion of provenance, in particular, whyminimal-provenance that keeps only subset-minimal witnesses to a query result. Another interesting question is whether we can adopt a more informative notion of provenance than why-provenance, in particular, whymultiplicity-provenance that also keeps track of how many times a certain fact occurs in a witness to a query result, without paying a price in data complexity. This work provides definitive answers to the above questions: (i) whyminimal-provenance ensures tractable data complexity, and (ii) whymultiplicity-provenance can be adopted without paying a price in complexity, apart from one surprising case where the data complexity becomes PSPACE-complete.

A common interpretation of soft constraints penalizes the database for every violation of every constraint, where the penalty is the cost (weight) of the constraint. A computational challenge is that of finding an optimal subset: a collection of database tuples that minimizes the total penalty when each tuple has a cost of being excluded. When the constraints are strict (i.e., have an infinite cost), this subset is a “cardinality repair” of an inconsistent database; in soft interpretations, this subset corresponds to a “most probable world” of a probabilistic database, a “most likely intention” of a probabilistic unclean database, and so on. Within the class of functional dependencies, the complexity of finding a cardinality repair is thoroughly understood. Yet, very little is known about the complexity of finding an optimal subset for the more general soft semantics. The work described in this manuscript makes significant progress in that direction. In addition to general insights about the hardness and approximability of the problem, we present algorithms for two special cases (and some generalizations thereof): a single functional dependency, and a bipartite matching. The latter is the problem of finding an optimal “almost matching” of a bipartite graph where a penalty is paid for every lost edge and every violation of monogamy. For these special cases, we also investigate the complexity of additional computational tasks that arise when the soft constraints are used as a means to represent a probabilistic database in the case of a probabilistic unclean database.

Operational consistent query answering (CQA) is a recent framework for CQA, based on revised definitions of repairs and consistent answers, which opens up the possibility of efficient approximations with explicit error guarantees. The main idea is to iteratively apply operations (e.g., fact deletions), starting from an inconsistent database, until we reach a database that is consistent w.r.t. the given set of constraints. This gives us the flexibility of choosing the probability with which we apply an operation, which in turn allows us to calculate the probability of an operational repair, and thus, the probability with which a consistent answer is entailed. A natural way of assigning probabilities to operations is by targeting the uniform probability distribution over a reasonable space such as the set of operational repairs, the set of sequences of operations that lead to an operational repair, and the set of available operations at a certain step of the repairing process. This leads to what we generally call uniform operational CQA. The goal of this work is to perform a data complexity analysis of both exact and approximate uniform operational CQA, focusing on functional dependencies (and subclasses thereof), and conjunctive queries. The main outcome of our analysis (among other positive and negative results), is that uniform operational CQA pushes the efficiency boundaries further by ensuring the existence of efficient approximation schemes in scenarios that go beyond the simple case of primary keys, which seems to be the limit of the classical approach to CQA.

A key task in the context of consistent query answering is to count the number of repairs that entail the query, with the ultimate goal being a precise data complexity classification. This has been achieved in the case of primary keys and self-join-free conjunctive queries (CQs) via an FP/#P-complete dichotomy. We lift this result to the more general case of functional dependencies (FDs). Another important task in this context is whenever the counting problem in question is intractable, to classify it as approximable, i.e., the target value can be efficiently approximated with error guarantees via a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS), or as inapproximable. Although for primary keys and CQs (even with self-joins) the problem is always approximable, we prove that this is not the case for FDs. We show, however, that the class of FDs with a left-hand side chain forms an island of approximability. We see these results, apart from being interesting in their own right, as crucial steps towards a complete classification of approximate counting of repairs in the case of FDs and self-join-free CQs.

A common interpretation of soft constraints penalizes the database for every violation of every constraint, where the penalty is the cost (weight) of the constraint. A computational challenge is that of finding an optimal subset: a collection of database tuples that minimizes the total penalty when each tuple has a cost of being excluded. When the constraints are strict (i.e., have an infinite cost), this subset is a "cardinality repair" of an inconsistent database; in soft interpretations, this subset corresponds to a "most probable world" of a probabilistic database, a "most likely intention" of a probabilistic unclean database, and so on. Within the class of functional dependencies, the complexity of finding a cardinality repair is thoroughly understood. Yet, very little is known about the complexity of finding an optimal subset for the more general soft semantics. This paper makes a significant progress in this direction. In addition to general insights about the hardness and approximability of the problem, we present algorithms for two special cases: a single functional dependency, and a bipartite matching. The latter is the problem of finding an optimal "almost matching" of a bipartite graph where a penalty is paid for every lost edge and every violation of monogamy.

Quantifying the inconsistency of a database is motivated by various goals including reliability estimation for new datasets and progress indication in data cleaning. Another goal is to attribute to individual tuples a level of responsibility to the overall inconsistency, and thereby prioritize tuples in the explanation or inspection of dirt. Therefore, inconsistency quantification and attribution have been a subject of much research in Knowledge Representation and, more recently, in Databases. As in many other fields, a conventional responsibility sharing mechanism is the Shapley value from cooperative game theory. In this paper, we carry out a systematic investigation of the complexity of the Shapley value in common inconsistency measures for functional-dependency (FD) violations. For several measures we establish a full classification of the FD sets into tractable and intractable classes with respect to Shapley-value computation. We also study the complexity of approximation in intractable cases.

How should we quantify the inconsistency of a database that violates integrity constraints? Proper measures are important for various tasks, such as progress indication and action prioritization in cleaning systems, and reliability estimation for new datasets. To choose an appropriate inconsistency measure, it is important to identify the desired properties in the application and understand which of these is guaranteed or at least expected in practice. For example, in some use cases, the inconsistency should reduce if constraints are eliminated; in others, it should be stable and avoid jitters and jumps in reaction to small changes in the database. We embark on a systematic investigation of properties for database inconsistency measures. We investigate a collection of basic measures that have been proposed in the past in both the Knowledge Representation and Database communities, analyze their theoretical properties, and empirically observe their behavior in an experimental study. We also demonstrate how the framework can lead to new inconsistency measures by introducing a new measure that, in contrast to the rest, satisfies all of the properties we consider and can be computed in polynomial time.

We investigate the application of the Shapley value to quantifying the contribution of a tuple to a query answer. The Shapley value is a widely known numerical measure in cooperative game theory and in many applications of game theory for assessing the contribution of a player to a coalition game. It has been established already in the 1950s, and is theoretically justified by being the very single wealth-distribution measure that satisfies some natural axioms. While this value has been investigated in several areas, it received little attention in data management. We study this measure in the context of conjunctive and aggregate queries by defining corresponding coalition games. We provide algorithmic and complexity-theoretic results on the computation of Shapley-based contributions to query answers; and for the hard cases we present approximation algorithms.

The Shapley value is a conventional and well-studied function for determining the contribution of a player to the coalition in a cooperative game. Among its applications in a plethora of domains, it has recently been proposed to use the Shapley value for quantifying the contribution of a tuple to the result of a database query. In particular, we have a thorough understanding of the tractability frontier for the class of Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and aggregate functions over CQs. It has also been established that a tractable (randomized) multiplicative approximation exists for every union of CQs. Nevertheless, all of these results are based on the monotonicity of CQs. In this work, we investigate the implication of negation on the complexity of Shapley computation, in both the exact and approximate senses. We generalize a known dichotomy to account for negated atoms. We also show that negation fundamentally changes the complexity of approximation. We do so by drawing a connection to the problem of deciding whether a tuple is "relevant" to a query, and by analyzing its complexity.

We investigate the complexity of computing an optimal repair of an inconsistent database, in the case where integrity constraints are Functional Dependencies (FDs). We focus on two types of repairs: an optimal subset repair (optimal S-repair) that is obtained by a minimum number of tuple deletions, and an optimal update repair (optimal U-repair) that is obtained by a minimum number of value (cell) up-dates. For computing an optimal S-repair, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that succeeds on certain sets of FDs and fails on others. We prove the following about the algorithm. When it succeeds, it can also incorporate weighted tuples and duplicate tuples. When it fails, the problem is NP-hard, and in fact, APX-complete (hence, cannot be approximated better than some constant). Thus, we establish a dichotomy in the complexity of computing an optimal S-repair. We present general analysis techniques for the complexity of computing an optimal U-repair, some based on the dichotomy for S-repairs. We also draw a connection to a past dichotomy in the complexity of finding a "most probable database" that satisfies a set of FDs with a single attribute on the left hand side; the case of general FDs was left open, and we show how our dichotomy provides the missing generalization and thereby settles the open problem.

In its traditional definition, a repair of an inconsistent database is a consistent database that differs from the inconsistent one in a "minimal way." Often, repairs are not equally legitimate, as it is desired to prefer one over another; for example, one fact is regarded more reliable than another, or a more recent fact should be preferred to an earlier one. Motivated by these considerations, researchers have introduced and investigated the framework of preferred repairs, in the context of denial constraints and subset repairs. There, a priority relation between facts is lifted towards a priority relation between consistent databases, and repairs are restricted to the ones that are optimal in the lifted sense. Three notions of lifting (and optimal repairs) have been proposed: Pareto, global, and completion. In this paper we investigate the complexity of deciding whether the priority relation suffices to clean the database unambiguously, or in other words, whether there is exactly one optimal repair. We show that the different lifting semantics entail highly different complexities. Under Pareto optimality, the problem is coNP-complete, in data complexity, for every set of functional dependencies (FDs), except for the tractable case of (equivalence to) one FD per relation. Under global optimality, one FD per relation is still tractable, but we establish Pi-2-p-completeness for a relation with two FDs. In contrast, under completion optimality the problem is solvable in polynomial time for every set of FDs. In fact, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for arbitrary conflict hypergraphs. We further show that under a general assumption of transitivity, this algorithm solves the problem even for global optimality. The algorithm is extremely simple, but its proof of correctness is quite intricate.

In the traditional sense, a subset repair of an inconsistent database refers to a consistent subset of facts (tuples) that is maximal under set containment. Preferences between pairs of facts allow to distinguish a set of preferred repairs based on relative reliability (source credibility, extraction quality, recency, etc.) of data items. Previous studies explored the problem of categoricity, where one aims to determine whether preferences suffice to repair the database unambiguously, or in other words, whether there is precisely one preferred repair. In this paper we study the ability to quantify ambiguity, by investigating two classes of problems. The first is that of counting the number of subset repairs, both preferred (under various common semantics) and traditional. We establish dichotomies in data complexity for the entire space of (sets of) functional dependencies. The second class of problems is that of enumerating (i.e., generating) the preferred repairs. We devise enumeration algorithms with efficiency guarantees on the delay between generated repairs, even for constraints represented as general conflict graphs or hypergraphs.