7 research outputs found
Causality and the semantics of provenance
Provenance, or information about the sources, derivation, custody or history
of data, has been studied recently in a number of contexts, including
databases, scientific workflows and the Semantic Web. Many provenance
mechanisms have been developed, motivated by informal notions such as
influence, dependence, explanation and causality. However, there has been
little study of whether these mechanisms formally satisfy appropriate policies
or even how to formalize relevant motivating concepts such as causality. We
contend that mathematical models of these concepts are needed to justify and
compare provenance techniques. In this paper we review a theory of causality
based on structural models that has been developed in artificial intelligence,
and describe work in progress on a causal semantics for provenance graphs.Comment: Workshop submissio
Complexity Results for Explanations in the Structural-Model Approach
We analyze the computational complexity of Halpern and Pearl's (causal) explanations in the structural-model approach, which are based on their notions of weak and actual causality. In particular, we give a precise picture of the complexity of deciding explanations, -partial explanations, and partial explanations, and of computing the explanatory power of partial explanations