We present an unsupervised method for aggregating anomalies in tabular datasets by identifying the top-k tabular data quality insights. Each insight consists of a set of anomalous attributes and the corresponding subsets of records that serve as evidence to the user. The process of identifying these insight blocks is challenging due to (i) the absence of labeled anomalies, (ii) the exponential size of the subset search space, and (iii) the complex dependencies among attributes, which obscure the true sources of anomalies. Simple frequency-based methods fail to capture these dependencies, leading to inaccurate results. To address this, we introduce Tab-Shapley, a cooperative game theory based framework that uses Shapley values to quantify the contribution of each attribute to the data's anomalous nature. While calculating Shapley values typically requires exponential time, we show that our game admits a closed-form solution, making the computation efficient. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through empirical analysis on real-world tabular datasets with ground-truth anomaly labels.

Enterprise data lakes often suffer from substantial amounts of duplicate and redundant data, with data volumes ranging from terabytes to petabytes. This leads to both increased storage costs and unnecessarily high maintenance costs for these datasets. In this work, we focus on identifying and reducing redundancy in enterprise data lakes by addressing the problem of "dataset containment". To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works that addresses table-level containment at a large scale. We propose R2D2: a three-step hierarchical pipeline that efficiently identifies almost all instances of containment by progressively reducing the search space in the data lake. It first builds (i) a schema containment graph, followed by (ii) statistical min-max pruning, and finally, (iii) content level pruning. We further propose minimizing the total storage and access costs by optimally identifying redundant datasets that can be deleted (and reconstructed on demand) while respecting latency constraints. We implement our system on Azure Databricks clusters using Apache Spark for enterprise data stored in ADLS Gen2, and on AWS clusters for open-source data. In contrast to existing modified baselines that are inaccurate or take several days to run, our pipeline can process an enterprise customer data lake at the TB scale in approximately 5 hours with high accuracy. We present theoretical results as well as extensive empirical validation on both enterprise (scale of TBs) and open-source datasets (scale of MBs - GBs), which showcase the effectiveness of our pipeline.

Sharmila Reddy Nangi, Atharv Tyagi, Jay Mundra, Sagnik Mukherjee, Raj Snehal, Niyati Chhaya, Aparna Garimella. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.