2 research outputs found
Fast and Reliable Missing Data Contingency Analysis with Predicate-Constraints
Today, data analysts largely rely on intuition to determine whether missing
or withheld rows of a dataset significantly affect their analyses. We propose a
framework that can produce automatic contingency analysis, i.e., the range of
values an aggregate SQL query could take, under formal constraints describing
the variation and frequency of missing data tuples. We describe how to process
SUM, COUNT, AVG, MIN, and MAX queries in these conditions resulting in hard
error bounds with testable constraints. We propose an optimization algorithm
based on an integer program that reconciles a set of such constraints, even if
they are overlapping, conflicting, or unsatisfiable, into such bounds. Our
experiments on real-world datasets against several statistical imputation and
inference baselines show that statistical techniques can have a deceptively
high error rate that is often unpredictable. In contrast, our framework offers
hard bounds that are guaranteed to hold if the constraints are not violated. In
spite of these hard bounds, we show competitive accuracy to statistical
baselines