Data discovery has gained significant traction in the database community resulting in various discovery operations, index schemes, and discovery systems. This tutorial explores the architecture and components of data discovery systems, focusing on indexing structures and scalable algorithms for typical operations, such as join and union discovery. While giving insights into individual algorithms, we point out open challenges for holistic systems, data discovery evaluation, and discovery in federated setups.

Traditional clustering methods assume that precise pairwise distances for the input data are readily available. However, this assumption is often impractical in real-world scenarios where data points cannot be measured accurately. For instance, machine learning-based techniques for estimating distances may fail when the dataset consists of images, videos, or natural language. This paper studies clustering and graph problems in settings where direct access to pairwise distances between all pairs is expensive. We adopt oracle-based methods as defined by Galhotra et al. (2024), focusing on two types of oracles: the quadruplet oracle, a weak and inexpensive comparator that answers binary queries of the form "Is A closer to B or C closer to D?" and the distance oracle, a stronger but costlier oracle that returns exact pairwise distances. The quadruplet oracle can be implemented via crowdsourcing, trained classifiers, or other predictive models. As these sources are often unreliable, the oracle’s responses may be noisy; we consider both probabilistic and adversarial noise models. Consider a finite metric space $\Sigma=(\mathcal{V},d)$ of size $|\mathcal{V}|=n$ that supports the quadruplet and the distance oracle. When the input dataset has low intrinsic (doubling) dimension, for each of the $k$-center, $k$-median, and $k$-means clustering problem on $\mathcal{V}$, we design constant approximation algorithms that perform $\widetilde{O}(n+k^2)$ calls to the quadruplet oracle and $\widetilde{O}(1)$ calls to the distance oracle in both noise models. For general metric spaces, our algorithms achieve constant approximation while making $\widetilde{O}(nk)$ calls to the quadruplet oracle and $\widetilde{O}(1)$ calls to the distance oracle. In all cases, we improve the quadruplet oracle query complexity by a factor of $k$ and the distance oracle call complexity by a factor of $k^2$ compared to Galhotra et al. (2024). Furthermore, in low dimensional settings, if the spread of the input data is polynomially bounded, we construct a data structure performing $\widetilde{O}(n)$ queries to the quadruplet oracle and $\widetilde{O}(1)$ queries to the distance oracle, such that given any query pair of vertices $(u,v)\in \mathcal{V}\times \mathcal{V}$, it approximates the distance $d(u,v)$ without using any oracle queries. Once the data structure is constructed, we can emulate standard algorithms for various graph problems on $\Sigma$ without additional oracle queries. In summary, our results show that access to a noisy pairwise ranker for distances is to sufficient to efficiently solve a large class of problems while almost entirely bypassing exact distance computations.

Effective data discovery is a cornerstone of modern data-driven decision-making. Yet, identifying datasets with specific distributional characteristics, such as percentiles or preferences, remains challenging. While recent proposals have enabled users to search based on percentile predicates, much of the research in data discovery relies on heuristic methods, which often result in biased outcomes. This paper presents the first theoretically backed framework that unifies data discovery under centralized and decentralized settings. More specifically, let P ={P 1 ,..., P N } be a repository of N datasets, such that each P i ⊂ ℝ d , where d is a constant. We study the percentile-aware indexing (Ptile) problem and the preference-aware indexing (Pref) problem under the centralized and the federated setting. In the centralized setting, we assume direct access to the datasets in P . In the federated setting we are given a synopsis S P i which is a compressed representation of P i that captures the structure of P i , for every i ∈ [N]. For the Ptile problem, the goal is to construct a data structure such that given a predicate (query rectangle R and an interval θ) report all indexes J such that j ∈ J if and only if |P j ∩ R|/|P j | ∈ [N]. For the Ptile problem, the goal is to construct a data structure such that given a predicate (query vector v → and an interval θ) report all indexes J such that j ∈ J if and only if ω k (P j ,v → )∈ θ, where ω k (p j ,v → ) is the score (inner-product) of the k -th largest projection of P j on v → . We first show lower bounds for the Ptile and Pref problems in the centralized setting, showing that we cannot hope for near-linear data structures with polylogarithmic query time. Then we focus on approximate data structures for both problems in both settings. We show Ø(N) space data structures with Ø(N) preprocessing time, that can answer Ptile and Pref queries in Ø(1+OUT) time, where OUT is the output size. The data structures return a set of indexes J such that: i) for every P i that satisfies the predicate, i ∈ J and ii) if j ∈ J then P j satisfies the predicate up to an additive error of ε+2δ, where ε is an arbitrarily small constant and δ is the error of the synopses.

Prescriptions, or actionable recommendations, are commonly generated across various fields to influence key outcomes such as improving public health, enhancing economic policies, or increasing business efficiency. While traditional association-based methods may identify correlations, they often fail to reveal the underlying causal factors needed for informed decision-making. On the other hand, in decision making for tasks with significant societal or economic impact, it is crucial to provide recommendations that are interpretable and justifiable, and equitable in terms of the outcome for both the protected and non-protected groups. Motivated by these two goals, this paper introduces a fairness-aware framework leveraging causal reasoning for generating a set of interpretable and actionable prescription rules (ruleset) toward betterment of an outcome while preventing exacerbating inequalities for protected groups. By considering group and individual fairness metrics from the literature, we ensure that both protected and non-protected groups benefit from these recommendations, providing a balanced and equitable approach to decision-making. We employ efficient optimizations to explore the vast and complex search space considering both fairness and coverage of the prescription ruleset. Empirical evaluation and case study on real-world datasets demonstrates the utility of our framework for different use cases.

Existing query languages for data discovery exhibit system-driven designs that emphasize database features and functionality over user needs. We propose a re-prioritization of the client through an introduction of a language-driven approach to data discovery systems that can leverage powerful results from programming languages research. In this paper, we describe TQL, a flexible and practical query language which incorporates a type-like system to encompass downstream transformation-context in its discovery queries. The syntax and semantics of TQL (including the underlying evaluation model), are formally defined, and a sketch of its implementation is also provided. Additionally, we provide comparisons to existing languages for data retrieval and data discovery to examine the advantages of TQL’s expanded expressive power in real-life settings.

Causal models are crucial for understanding complex systems and identifying causal relationships among variables. Even though causal models are extremely popular, conditional probability calculation of formulas involving interventions pose significant challenges. In case of Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs), Pearl assumes autonomy of mechanisms that determine interventions to calculate a range of probabilities. We show that by making simple yet often realistic independence assumptions, it is possible to uniquely estimate the probability of an interventional formula (including the well-studied notions of probability of sufficiency and necessity). We discuss when these assumptions are appropriate. Importantly, in many cases of interest, when the assumptions are appropriate, these probability estimates can be evaluated using observational data, which carries immense significance in scenarios where conducting experiments is impractical or unfeasible.

In this paper, we address clustering problems in scenarios where accurate direct access to the full dataset is impractical or impossible. Instead, we leverage oracle-based methods, which are particularly valuable in real-world applications where the data may be noisy, restricted due to privacy concerns or sheer volume. We utilize two oracles, the quadruplet and the distance oracle. The quadruplet oracle is a weaker oracle that only approximately compares the distances of two pairs of vertices. In practice, these oracles can be implemented using crowdsourcing or training classifiers or other predictive models. On the other hand, the distance oracle returns exactly the distance of two vertices, so it is a stronger and more expensive oracle to implement. We consider two noise models for the quadruplet oracle. In the adversarial noise model, if two pairs have similar distances, the response is chosen by an adversary. In the probabilistic noise model, the pair with the smaller distance is returned with a constant probability. We consider a set V of n vertices in a metric space that supports the quadruplet and the distance oracle. For each of the k-center, k-median, and k-means clustering problem on V, we design constant approximation algorithms that perform roughly O(nk) calls to the quadruplet oracle and O(k^2) calls to the distance oracle in both noise models. When the dataset has low intrinsic dimension, we significantly improve the approximation factors of our algorithms by performing a few additional calls to the distance oracle. We also show that for k-median and k-means clustering there is no hope to return any sublinear approximation using only the quadruplet oracle. Finally, we give constant approximation algorithms for estimating the clustering cost induced by any set of k vertices, performing roughly O(nk) calls to the quadruplet oracle and O(k^2) calls to the distance oracle.

Causal analysis is essential for gaining insights into complex real-world processes and making informed decisions. However, performing accurate causal analysis on observational data is generally infeasible, and therefore, domain experts start exploration with the identification of correlations. The increased availability of data from open government websites, organizations, and scientific studies presents an opportunity to harness observational datasets in assisting domain experts during this exploratory phase. In this work, we introduce Nexus, a system designed to align large repositories of spatio-temporal datasets and identify correlations, facilitating the exploration of causal relationships. Nexus addresses the challenges of aligning tabular datasets across space and time, handling missing data, and identifying correlations deemed "interesting". Empirical evaluation on Chicago Open Data and United Nations datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of Nexus in exposing interesting correlations, many of which have undergone extensive scrutiny by social scientists.

The task of extracting a diverse subset from a dataset, often referred to as maximum diversification, plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications that have far-reaching consequences. In this work, we delve into the realm of fairness-aware data subset selection, specifically focusing on the problem of selecting a diverse set of size k from a large collection of n data points (FairDiv). The FairDiv problem is well-studied in the data management and theory community. In this work, we develop the first constant approximation algorithm for FairDiv that runs in near-linear time using only linear space. In contrast, all previously known constant approximation algorithms run in super-linear time (with respect to n or k) and use super-linear space. Our approach achieves this efficiency by employing a novel combination of the Multiplicative Weight Update method and advanced geometric data structures to implicitly and approximately solve a linear program. Furthermore, we improve the efficiency of our techniques by constructing a coreset. Using our coreset, we also propose the first efficient streaming algorithm for the FairDiv problem whose efficiency does not depend on the distribution of data points. Empirical evaluation on million-sized datasets demonstrates that our algorithm achieves the best diversity within a minute. All prior techniques are either highly inefficient or do not generate a good solution.

Efficient data discovery is crucial in the era of data-driven decisionmaking. However, current practices face significant challenges due to the intricacies of identifying datasets with specific distributional characteristics, such as percentiles, when data repositories are decentralized. Traditional keyword-based search methods are insufficient for these complex requirements, often resulting in suboptimal dataset search results. To address these challenges, this paper presents Fainder, a fast and accurate index for "percentile predicates" on histogram-based data summaries, which streamlines the search process for datasets with specific distributional requirements. Fainder can be constructed on heterogeneous histogram collections and employs binary search in conjunction with multi-step pruning techniques to efficiently identify search results for percentile predicates. Thereby, it simplifies data provisioning and improves the effectiveness of dataset discovery. Empirical evaluation of our solution on three large-scale data repositories shows that Fainder is effective for distribution-aware dataset search and provides order-of-magnitude efficiency gains over baselines.

Data is a central component of machine learning and causal inference tasks. The availability of large amounts of data from sources such as open data repositories, data lakes and data marketplaces creates an opportunity to augment data and boost those tasks’ performance. However, augmentation techniques rely on a user manually discovering and shortlisting useful candidate augmentations. Existing solutions do not leverage the synergy between discovery and augmentation, thus underexploiting data.In this paper, we introduce Metam, a novel goal-oriented framework that queries the downstream task with a candidate dataset, forming a feedback loop that automatically steers the discovery and augmentation process. To select candidates efficiently, Metam leverages properties of the: i) data, ii) utility function, and iii) solution set size. We show Metam’s theoretical guarantees and demonstrate those empirically on a broad set of tasks. All in all, we demonstrate the promise of goal-oriented data discovery to modern data science applications.

We present Ver1, a data discovery system that identifies project-join views over large repositories of tables that do not contain join path information, and even when input queries are inaccurate. Ver implements a reference architecture to solve both the technical (scale and search) and human (semantic ambiguity, navigating a large number of results) problems of view discovery. We demonstrate users find the view they want when using Ver with a user study and we demonstrate its performance with large-scale end-to-end experiments on real-world datasets containing tens of millions of join paths.

What-if and How-to queries are fundamental data analysis questions that provide insights about the effects of a hypothetical update without actually making changes to the database. Traditional systems assume independence across differ¬ent tuples and non-updated attributes of the database. However, different attributes and tuples are generally dependent in real-world scenarios. We propose to demonstrate HypeR, a novel system to efficiently answer what-if and how-to queries while capturing causal dependencies among different attributes and tuples in the database. To compute the results, HypeR leverages a suite of optimizations along with techniques from causal inference to effectively estimate the answers. HypeR allows users to formulate complex hypothetical queries by using a novel SQL-like syntax and presents the output as interactive visualizations that can be explored and analyzed with ease.

To capture the inherent geometric features of many community detection problems, we propose to use a new random graph model of communities that we call a Geometric Block Model. The geometric block model builds on the random geometric graphs (Gilbert, 1961), one of the basic models of random graphs for spatial networks, in the same way that the well-studied stochastic block model builds on the Erdos-Renyi random graphs. It is also a natural extension of random community models inspired by the recent theoretical and practical advancements in community detection. To analyze the geometric block model, we first provide new connectivity results for random annulus graphs which are generalizations of random geometric graphs. The connectivity properties of geometric graphs have been studied since their introduction, and analyzing them has been more difficult than their Erdos-Renyi counterparts, due to correlated edge formation. We then use the connectivity results of random annulus graphs to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for efficient recovery of communities for the geometric block model. We show that a simple triangle-counting algorithm to detect communities in the geometric block model is near-optimal. For this, we consider the following two regimes of graph density. In the regime where the average degree of the graph grows logarithmically with the number of vertices, we show that our algorithm performs extremely well, both theoretically and practically. In contrast, the triangle-counting algorithm is far from being optimum for the stochastic block model in the logarithmic degree regime. We simulate our results on both real and synthetic datasets to show superior performance of both the new model as well as our algorithm.

This paper proposes a novel framework for certifying the fairness of predictive models trained on biased data. It draws from query answering for incomplete and inconsistent databases to formulate the problem of consistent range approximation (CRA) of fairness queries for a predictive model on a target population. The framework employs background knowledge of the data collection process and biased data, working with or without limited statistics about the target population, to compute a range of answers for fairness queries. Using CRA, the framework builds predictive models that are certifiably fair on the target population, regardless of the availability of external data during training. The framework's efficacy is demonstrated through evaluations on real data, showing substantial improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Algorithmic decision-making systems are success-fully being adopted in a wide range of domains for diverse tasks. While the potential benefits of algorithmic decision-making are many, the importance of trusting these systems has only recently attracted attention. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) that aims to reduce the opacity of a model by explaining its behavior, its predictions or both, thus allowing humans to scrutinize and trust the model. A host of technical advances have been made and several explanation methods have been proposed in recent years that address the problem of model explainability. In this tutorial, we will present these novel explanation approaches, characterize their strengths and limitations, and enumerate opportunities for data management research in the context of XAI.

As data is a central component of many modern systems, the cause of a system malfunction may reside in the data, and, specifically, particular properties of data. E.g., a health-monitoring system that is designed under the assumption that weight is reported in lbs will malfunction when encountering weight reported in kilograms. Like software debugging, which aims to find bugs in the source code or runtime conditions, our goal is to debug data to identify potential sources of disconnect between the assumptions about some data and systems that operate on that data. We propose DataPrism, a framework to identify data properties (profiles) that are the root causes of performance degradation or failure of a data-driven system. Such identification is necessary to repair data and resolve the disconnect between data and systems. Our technique is based on causal reasoning through interventions: when a system malfunctions for a dataset, DataPrism alters the data profiles and observes changes in the system's behavior due to the alteration. Unlike statistical observational analysis that reports mere correlations, DataPrism reports causally verified root causes -- in terms of data profiles -- of the system malfunction. We empirically evaluate DataPrism on seven real-world and several synthetic data-driven systems that fail on certain datasets due to a diverse set of reasons. In all cases, DataPrism identifies the root causes precisely while requiring orders of magnitude fewer interventions than prior techniques.

In many applications, entity references (i.e., records) and entities need to be organized to capture diverse relationships like type-subtype, is-A (mapping entities to types), and duplicate (mapping records to entities) relationships. However, automatic identification of such relationships is often inaccurate due to noise and heterogeneous representation of records across sources. Similarly, manual maintenance of these relationships is infeasible and does not scale to large datasets. In this work, we circumvent these challenges by considering weak supervision in the form of an oracle to formulate a novel hierarchical ER task. In this setting, records are clustered in a tree-like structure containing records at leaf-level and capturing record-entity (duplicate), entity-type (is-A) and subtype-supertype relationships. For effective use of supervision, we leverage triplet comparison oracle queries that take three records as input and output the most similar pair(s). We develop HierER, a querying strategy that uses record pair similarities to minimize the number of oracle queries while maximizing the identified hierarchical structure. We show theoretically and empirically that HierER is effective under different similarity noise models and demonstrate empirically that HierER can scale up to million-size datasets.

What-if (provisioning for an update to a database) and how-to (how to modify the database to achieve a goal) analyses provide insights to users who wish to examine hypothetical scenarios without making actual changes to a database and thereby help plan strategies in their fields. Typically, such analyses are done by testing the effect of an update in the existing database on a specific view created by a query of interest. In real-world scenarios, however, an update to a particular part of the database may affect tuples and attributes in a completely different part due to implicit semantic dependencies. To allow for hypothetical reasoning while accommodating such dependencies, we develop HypeR, a framework that supports what-if and how-to queries accounting for probabilistic dependencies among attributes captured by a probabilistic causal model. We extend the SQL syntax to include the necessary operators for expressing these hypothetical queries, define their semantics, devise efficient algorithms and optimizations to compute their results using concepts from causality and probabilistic databases, and evaluate the effectiveness of our approach experimentally.

The use of machine learning (ML) in high-stakes societal decisions has encouraged the consideration of fairness throughout the ML lifecycle. Although data integration is one of the primary steps to generate high-quality training data, most of the fairness literature ignores this stage. In this work, we consider fairness in the integration component of data management, aiming to identify features that improve prediction without adding any bias to the dataset. We work under the causal fairness paradigm. Without requiring the underlying structural causal model a priori, we propose an approach to identify a sub-collection of features that ensure fairness of the dataset by performing conditional independence tests between different subsets of features. We use group testing to improve the complexity of the approach. We theoretically prove the correctness of the proposed algorithm and show that sublinear conditional independence tests are sufficient to identify these variables. A detailed empirical evaluation is performed on real-world datasets to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our technique.

Algorithmic decision-making systems are successfully being adopted in a wide range of domains for diverse tasks. While the potential benefits of algorithmic decision-making are many, the importance of trusting these systems has only recently attracted attention. There is growing concern that these systems are complex, opaque and non-intuitive, and hence are difficult to trust. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) that aims to reduce the opacity of a model by explaining its behavior, its predictions or both, thus allowing humans to scrutinize and trust the model. A host of technical advances have been made and several explanation methods have been proposed in recent years that address the problem of model explainability and transparency. In this tutorial, we will present these novel explanation approaches, characterize their strengths and limitations, position existing work with respect to the database (DB) community, and enumerate opportunities for data management research in the context of XAI.

Center-based clustering techniques are fundamental to many real-world applications such as data summarization and social network analysis. In this work, we study the problem of fairness aware k-center clustering over large datasets. We are given an input dataset comprising a set of n points, where each point belongs to a specific demographic group characterized by a protected attribute, such as race or gender. The goal is to identify k clusters such that all clusters have considerable representation from all groups and the maximum radius of these clusters is minimized.

In data science problems, understanding the data is a crucial first step. However, it can be challenging and time intensive for a data scientist who is not an expert in that domain. Several downstream tasks such as feature engineering and data curation depend on the understanding of data semantics. In this demonstration, we present, ADE (Automated Data Explanation) , a novel system that uses maximum likelihood estimation approach through ensembles for automatically labeling and explaining relational data by taking advantage of openly available semantic knowledge bases, webtables and Wikipedia. It helps a user to understand concepts of various columns and their relationships, an abstract summary about the overall data, and additional context not present in the data. It reduces the need for cumbersome search queries or expert consultation and can also receive inputs or corrections from a user, making it a mixed-initiative automation system.

Fair clustering is the process of grouping similar entities together, while satisfying a mathematically well-defined fairness metric as a constraint. Due to the practical challenges in precise model specification, the prescribed fairness constraints are often incomplete and act as proxies to the intended fairness requirement. Clustering with proxies may lead to biased outcomes when the system is deployed. We examine how to identify the intended fairness constraint for a problem based on limited demonstrations from an expert. Each demonstration is a clustering over a subset of the data. We present an algorithm to identify the fairness metric from demonstrations and generate clusters using existing off-the-shelf clustering techniques, and analyze its theoretical properties. To extend our approach to novel fairness metrics for which clustering algorithms do not currently exist, we present a greedy method for clustering. Additionally, we investigate how to generate interpretable solutions using our approach. Empirical evaluation on three real-world datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in quickly identifying the underlying fairness and interpretability constraints, which are then used to generate fair and interpretable clusters.

Determining the semantic concepts of columns in tabular data is of use for many applications ranging from data integration, cleaning, search to feature engineering and model building in machine learning. Several prior works have proposed supervised learning-based or heuristic-based approaches to semantic type annotation. These techniques suffer from poor generalizability over a large number of concepts or examples. Recent neural network based supervised learning methods generalize to different datasets but require large amounts of curated training data and also present scalability issues. Furthermore, none of the known methods works well for numerical data. We present C2, a system that maps each column to a concept based on a maximum likelihood estimation approach through ensembles. It is able to effectively utilize vast amounts of, albeit somewhat noisy, openly available table corpora in addition to two popular knowledge graphs (Wikidata and DBpedia), to perform effective and efficient concept annotation for tabular data. Specifically, we utilize a collection of 32 million openly available webtables from several sources. We also present efficient indexing techniques for categorical string, numeric and mixed-type data, and novel techniques for table context utilization. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of C2 over available techniques on 9 real-world datasets containing a wide variety of concepts.

Blocking is a key component of Entity Resolution (ER) that aims to improve efficiency by quickly pruning out non-matching record pairs. However, depending on the noise in the dataset and the distribution of entity cluster sizes, existing techniques can be either (a) too aggressive, such that they help scale but can adversely affect the ER effectiveness, or (b) too permissive, potentially harming ER efficiency. We propose a new methodology of progressive blocking that enables both efficient and effective ER and works across different entity cluster size distributions without manual fine tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate BEER (Blocking for Effective Entity Resolution), the first end-to-end system that leverages intermediate ER output in a feedback loop to refine the blocking result in a data-driven fashion, thereby enabling effective entity resolution. BEER allows the user to explore the different components of the ER pipeline, analyze the effectiveness of alternative blocking techniques and understand the interaction between blocking and ER. BEER supports visualization of the different entities present in a block, explains the change in blocking output with every round of feedback and allows the end-user to interactively compare different techniques. BEER has been developed as open-source software; the code and the demonstration video are available at beer-system.github.io.

Creating and collecting labeled data is one of the major bottlenecks in machine learning pipelines and the emergence of automated feature generation techniques such as deep learning, which typically requires a lot of training data, has further exacerbated the problem. While weak-supervision techniques have circumvented this bottleneck, existing frameworks either require users to write a set of diverse, high-quality rules to label data (e.g., Snorkel), or require a labeled subset of the data to automatically mine rules (e.g., Snuba). The process of manually writing rules can be tedious and time consuming. At the same time, creating a labeled subset of the data can be costly and even infeasible in imbalanced settings.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) that aims to reduce the opaqueness of AI-based decision-making systems, allowing humans to scrutinize and trust them. Prior work in this context has focused on the attribution of responsibility for an algorithm's decisions to its inputs wherein responsibility is typically approached as a purely associational concept. In this paper, we propose a principled causality-based approach for explaining black-box decision-making systems that addresses limitations of existing methods in XAI. At the core of our framework lies probabilistic contrastive counterfactuals, a concept that can be traced back to philosophical, cognitive, and social foundations of theories on how humans generate and select explanations. We show how such counterfactuals can quantify the direct and indirect influences of a variable on decisions made by an algorithm, and provide actionable recourse for individuals negatively affected by the algorithm's decision. Unlike prior work, our system, LEWIS: (1)~can compute provably effective explanations and recourse at local, global and contextual levels; (2)~is designed to work with users with varying levels of background knowledge of the underlying causal model; and (3)~makes no assumptions about the internals of an algorithmic system except for the availability of its input-output data. We empirically evaluate LEWIS on four real-world datasets and show that it generates human-understandable explanations that improve upon state-of-the-art approaches in XAI, including the popular LIME and SHAP. Experiments on synthetic data further demonstrate the correctness of LEWIS's explanations and the scalability of its recourse algorithm.

Metric based comparison operations such as finding maximum, nearest and farthest neighbor are fundamental to studying various clustering techniques such as k -center clustering and agglomerative hierarchical clustering. These techniques crucially rely on accurate estimation of pairwise distance between records. However, computing exact features of the records, and their pairwise distances is often challenging, and sometimes not possible. We circumvent this challenge by leveraging weak supervision in the form of a comparison oracle that compares the relative distance between the queried points such as `Is point u closer to v or w closer to x ?'. However, it is possible that some queries are easier to answer than others using a comparison oracle. We capture this by introducing two different noise models called adversarial and probabilistic noise. In this paper, we study various problems that include finding maximum, nearest/farthest neighbor search under these noise models. Building upon the techniques we develop for these problems, we give robust algorithms for k -center clustering and agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We prove that our algorithms achieve good approximation guarantees with a high probability and analyze their query complexity. We evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques empirically on various real-world datasets.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to reduce the opacity of AI-based decision-making systems, allowing humans to scrutinize and trust them. Unlike prior work that attributes the responsibility for an algorithm's decisions to its inputs as a purely associational concept, we propose a principled causality-based approach for explaining black-box decision-making systems. We present the demonstration of Lewis, a system that generates explanations for black-box algorithms at the global, contextual, and local levels, and provides actionable recourse for individuals negatively affected by an algorithm's decision. Lewis makes no assumptions about the internals of the algorithm except for the availability of its input-output data. The explanations generated by Lewis are based on probabilistic contrastive counterfactuals, a concept that can be traced back to philosophical, cognitive, and social foundations of theories on how humans generate and select explanations. We describe the system layout of Lewis wherein an end-user specifies the underlying causal model and Lewis generates explanations for particular use-cases, compares them with explanations generated by state-of-the-art approaches in XAI, and provides actionable recourse when applicable. Lewis has been developed as open-source software; the code and the demonstration video are available at lewis-system.github.io.

Graph clustering groups entities -- the vertices of a graph -- based on their similarity, typically using a complex distance function over a large number of features. Successful integration of clustering approaches in automated decision-support systems hinges on the interpretability of the resulting clusters. This paper addresses the problem of generating interpretable clusters, given features of interest that signify interpretability to an end-user, by optimizing interpretability in addition to common clustering objectives. We propose a β-interpretable clustering algorithm that ensures that at least β fraction of nodes in each cluster share the same feature value. The tunable parameter β is user-specified. We also present a more efficient algorithm for scenarios with β\!=\!1$ and analyze the theoretical guarantees of the two algorithms. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of our approaches in generating interpretable clusters using four real-world datasets. The interpretability of the clusters is complemented by generating simple explanations denoting the feature values of the nodes in the clusters, using frequent pattern mining.

Searching through large structured data is a crucial task in enterprise as well as online search. Existing keyword-based search methods were mostly designed for web document search, and support a limited variety of query types suitable for structured data. Their main underlying drawback is the lack of semantic understanding of the data and users' natural language queries, resulting in a fundamental disconnect. In this paper, we bridge that gap through effective semantic type discovery and indexing of structured data. We demonstrate S3D (Semantic Search over Structured Data), a novel system that supports queries such as finding related tables, rows or columns, amongst others, on a large scale of structured data from multiple heterogeneous sources.

Random geometric graph (Gilbert, 1961) is a basic model of random graphs for spatial networks proposed shortly after the introduction of the Erdős-Rényi random graphs. The geometric block model (GBM) is a probabilistic model for community detection defined over random geometric graphs (RGG) similar in spirit to the popular stochastic block model which is defined over Erdős-Rényi random graphs. The GBM naturally inherits many desirable properties of RGGs such as transitivity ("friends having common friends') and has been shown to model many real-world networks better than the stochastic block model. Analyzing the properties of a GBM requires new tools and perspectives to handle correlation in edge formation. In this paper, we study the necessary and sufficient conditions for community recovery over GBM in the connectivity regime. We provide efficient algorithms that recover the communities exactly with high probability and match the lower bound within a small constant factor. This requires us to prove new connectivity results for vertex-random graphs or random annulus graphs which are natural generalizations of random geometric graphs. A vertex-random graph is a model of random graphs where the randomness lies in the vertices as opposed to an Erdős-Rényi random graph where the randomness lies in the edges. A vertex-random graph G(n, [r_1, r_2]), 0 <=r_1 0 vs when r_1=0 (RGG). We then extend the connectivity results to high dimensions. These results play a crucial role in analyzing the GBM.

To capture the inherent geometric features of many community detection problems, we propose to use a new random graph model of communities that we call a Geometric Block Model. The geometric block model generalizes the random geometric graphs in the same way that the well-studied stochastic block model generalizes the Erdös-Renyi random graphs. It is also a natural extension of random community models inspired by the recent theoretical and practical advancement in community detection. While being a topic of fundamental theoretical interest, our main contribution is to show that many practical community structures are better explained by the geometric block model. We also show that a simple triangle-counting algorithm to detect communities in the geometric block model is near-optimal. Indeed, even in the regime where the average degree of the graph grows only logarithmically with the number of vertices (sparse-graph), we show that this algorithm performs extremely well, both theoretically and practically. In contrast, the triangle-counting algorithm is far from being optimum for the stochastic block model. We simulate our results on both real and synthetic datasets to show superior performance of both the new model as well as our algorithm.

Entity resolution (ER) seeks to identify which records in a data set refer to the same real-world entity. Given the diversity of ways in which entities can be represented, matched and distinguished, ER is known to be a challenging task for automated strategies, but relatively easier for expert humans. In our work, we abstract the knowledge of experts with the notion of a binary oracle. Our oracle can answer questions of the form "do records u and v refer to the same entity?" under a flexible error model, allowing for some questions to be more difficult to answer correctly than others.

Influence maximization (IM) on social networks is one of the most active areas of research in computer science. While various IM techniques proposed over the last decade have definitely enriched the field, unfortunately, experimental reports on existing techniques fall short in validity and integrity since many comparisons are not based on a common platform or merely discussed in theory. In this paper, we perform an in-depth benchmarking study of IM techniques on social networks. Specifically, we design a benchmarking platform, which enables us to evaluate and compare the existing techniques systematically and thoroughly under identical experimental conditions. Our benchmarking results analyze and diagnose the inherent deficiencies of the existing approaches and surface the open challenges in IM even after a decade of research. More fundamentally, we unearth and debunk a series of myths and establish that there is no single state-of-the-art technique in IM. At best, a technique is the state of the art in only one aspect.

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.

Quality assurance (QA) and customer satisfaction (C-Sat) analysis are two commonly used practices to measure goodness of dialogues between agents and customers in contact centers. The practices however have a few shortcomings. QA puts sole emphasis on agents’ organizational compliance aspect whereas C-Sat attempts to measure customers’ satisfaction only based on post dialogue surveys. As a result, outcome of independent QA and C-Sat analysis may not always be in correspondence. Secondly, both processes are retrospective in nature and hence, evidences of bad past dialogues (and consequently bad customer experiences) can only be found after hours or days or weeks depending on their periodicity. Finally, human intensive nature of these practices lead to time and cost overhead while being able to analyze only a small fraction of dialogues. In this paper, we introduce an automatic real-time quality assurance system for contact centers — QART (pronounced cart). QART performs multi-faceted analysis on dialogue utterances, as they happen, using sophisticated statistical and rule-based natural language processing (NLP) techniques. It covers various aspects inspired by today’s QA and C-Sat practices as well as introduces novel incremental dialogue summarization capability. QART front-end is an interactive dashboard providing views of ongoing dialogues at different granularity enabling agents’ supervisors to monitor and take corrective actions as needed. We demonstrate effectiveness of different back-end modules as well as the overall system by experimental results on a real-life contact center chat dataset.

The steady growth of graph data from social networks has resulted in wide-spread research in finding solutions to the influence maximization problem. In this paper, we propose a holistic solution to the influence maximization (IM) problem. (1) We introduce an opinion-cum-interaction (OI) model that closely mirrors the real-world scenarios. Under the OI model, we introduce a novel problem of Maximizing the Effective Opinion (MEO) of influenced users. We prove that the MEO problem is NP-hard and cannot be approximated within a constant ratio unless P=NP. (2) We propose a heuristic algorithm OSIM to efficiently solve the MEO problem. To better explain the OSIM heuristic, we first introduce EaSyIM - the opinion-oblivious version of OSIM, a scalable algorithm capable of running within practical compute times on commodity hardware. In addition to serving as a fundamental building block for OSIM, EaSyIM is capable of addressing the scalability aspect - memory consumption and running time, of the IM problem as well. Empirically, our algorithms are capable of maintaining the deviation in the spread always within 5% of the best known methods in the literature. In addition, our experiments show that both OSIM and EaSyIM are effective, efficient, scalable and significantly enhance the ability to analyze real datasets.

Monitoring the formation and evolution of communities in large online social networks such as Twitter is an important problem that has generated considerable interest in both industry and academia. Fundamentally, the problem can be cast as studying evolving sugraphs (each subgraph corresponding to a topical community) on an underlying social graph - with users as nodes and the connection between them as edges. A key metric of interest in this setting is tracking the changes to the conductance of subgraphs induced by edge activations. This metric quantifies how well or poorly connected a subgraph is to the rest of the graph relative to its internal connections. Conductance has been demonstrated to be of great use in many applications, such as identifying bursty topics, tracking the spread of rumors, and so on. However, tracking this simple metric presents a considerable scalability challenge - the underlying social network is large, the number of communities that are active at any moment is large, the rate at which these communities evolve is high, and moreover, we need to track conductance in real-time. We address these challenges in this paper. We propose an in-memory approximation called BloomGraphs to store and update these (possibly overlapping) evolving subgraphs. As the name suggests, we use Bloom filters to represent an approximation of the underlying graph. This representation is compact and computationally efficient to maintain in the presence of updates. This is especially important when we need to simultaneously maintain thousands of evolving subgraphs. BloomGraphs are used in computing and tracking conductance of these subgraphs as edge-activations arrive. BloomGraphs have several desirable properties in the context of this application, including a small memory footprint and efficient updateability. We also demonstrate mathematically that the error incurred in computing conductance is one-sided and that in the case of evolving subgraphs the change in approximate conductance has the same sign as the change in exact conductance in most cases. We validate the effectiveness of BloomGraphs through extensive experimentation on large Twitter graphs and other social networks.

We investigate the condition on transmission radius needed to achieve connectivity in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (briefly, DC-WSNs). First, we settle a conjecture of Das et al. [2012] and prove that the connectivity condition on random geometric graphs (RGGs), given by Gupta and Kumar [1989], can be used to derive a weakly sufficient condition to achieve connectivity in DC-WSNs. To find a stronger result, we define a new vertex-based random connection model that is of independent interest. Following a proof technique of Penrose [1991], we prove that when the density of the nodes approaches infinity, then a finite component of size greater than 1 exists with probability 0 in this model. We use this result to obtain an optimal condition on node transmission radius that is both necessary and sufficient to achieve connectivity and is hence optimal . The optimality of such a radius is also tested via simulation for two specific duty-cycle schemes, called the contiguous and the random selection duty-cycle schemes. Finally, we design a minimum-radius duty-cycling scheme that achieves connectivity with a transmission radius arbitrarily close to the one required in random geometric graphs. The overhead in this case is that we have to spend some time computing the schedule.

We investigate the condition on transmission radius needed to achieve connectivity in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (briefly, DC-WSN). First, we settle a conjecture of Das et. al. (2012) and prove that the connectivity condition on Random Geometric Graphs (RGG), given by Gupta and Kumar (1989), can be used to derive a weak sufficient condition to achieve connectivity in DC-WSN. We also present a stronger result which gives a necessary and sufficient condition for connectivity and is hence optimal. The optimality of such a radius is also tested via simulation for two specific duty-cycle schemes, called the contiguous and the random selection duty-cycle scheme.