Efficient Discovery of Ontology Functional Dependencies

Poor data quality has become a pervasive issue due to the increasing complexity and size of modern datasets. Constraint based data cleaning techniques rely on integrity constraints as a benchmark to identify and correct errors. Data values that do not satisfy the given set of constraints are flagged as dirty, and data updates are made to re-align the data and the constraints. However, many errors often require user input to resolve due to domain expertise defining specific terminology and relationships. For example, in pharmaceuticals, 'Advil' \emph{is-a} brand name for 'ibuprofen' that can be captured in a pharmaceutical ontology. While functional dependencies (FDs) have traditionally been used in existing data cleaning solutions to model syntactic equivalence, they are not able to model broader relationships (e.g., is-a) defined by an ontology. In this paper, we take a first step towards extending the set of data quality constraints used in data cleaning by defining and discovering \emph{Ontology Functional Dependencies} (OFDs). We lay out theoretical and practical foundations for OFDs, including a set of sound and complete axioms, and a linear inference procedure. We then develop effective algorithms for discovering OFDs, and a set of optimizations that efficiently prune the search space. Our experimental evaluation using real data show the scalability and accuracy of our algorithms.Comment: 12 page

Extending dependencies for improving data quality

This doctoral thesis presents the results of my work on extending dependencies for improving data quality, both in a centralized environment with a single database and in a data exchange and integration environment with multiple databases. The first part of the thesis proposes five classes of data dependencies, referred to as CINDs, eCFDs, CFDcs, CFDps and CINDps, to capture data inconsistencies commonly found in practice in a centralized environment. For each class of these dependencies, we investigate two central problems: the satisfiability problem and the implication problem. The satisfiability problem is to determine given a set Σ of dependencies defined on a database schema R, whether or not there exists a nonempty database D of R that satisfies Σ. And the implication problem is to determine whether or not a set Σ of dependencies defined on a database schema R entails another dependency φ on R. That is, for each database D ofRthat satisfies Σ, the D must satisfy φ as well. These are important for the validation and optimization of data-cleaning processes. We establish complexity results of the satisfiability problem and the implication problem for all these five classes of dependencies, both in the absence of finite-domain attributes and in the general setting with finite-domain attributes. Moreover, SQL-based techniques are developed to detect data inconsistencies for each class of the proposed dependencies, which can be easily implemented on the top of current database management systems. The second part of the thesis studies three important topics for data cleaning in a data exchange and integration environment with multiple databases. One is the dependency propagation problem, which is to determine, given a view defined on data sources and a set of dependencies on the sources, whether another dependency is guaranteed to hold on the view. We investigate dependency propagation for views defined in various fragments of relational algebra, conditional functional dependencies (CFDs) [FGJK08] as view dependencies, and for source dependencies given as either CFDs or traditional functional dependencies (FDs). And we establish lower and upper bounds, all matching, ranging from PTIME to undecidable. These not only provide the first results for CFD propagation, but also extend the classical work of FD propagation by giving new complexity bounds in the presence of a setting with finite domains. We finally provide the first algorithm for computing a minimal cover of all CFDs propagated via SPC views. The algorithm has the same complexity as one of the most efficient algorithms for computing a cover of FDs propagated via a projection view, despite the increased expressive power of CFDs and SPC views. Another one is matching records from unreliable data sources. A class of matching dependencies (MDs) is introduced for specifying the semantics of unreliable data. As opposed to static constraints for schema design such as FDs, MDs are developed for record matching, and are defined in terms of similarity metrics and a dynamic semantics. We identify a special case of MDs, referred to as relative candidate keys (RCKs), to determine what attributes to compare and how to compare them when matching records across possibly different relations. We also propose a mechanism for inferring MDs with a sound and complete system, a departure from traditional implication analysis, such that when we cannot match records by comparing attributes that contain errors, we may still find matches by using other, more reliable attributes. We finally provide a quadratic time algorithm for inferring MDs, and an effective algorithm for deducing quality RCKs from a given set of MDs. The last one is finding certain fixes for data monitoring [CGGM03, SMO07], which is to find and correct errors in a tuple when it is created, either entered manually or generated by some process. That is, we want to ensure that a tuple t is clean before it is used, to prevent errors introduced by adding t. As noted by [SMO07], it is far less costly to correct a tuple at the point of entry than fixing it afterward. Data repairing based on integrity constraints may not find certain fixes that are absolutely correct, and worse, may introduce new errors when repairing the data. We propose a method for finding certain fixes, based on master data, a notion of certain regions, and a class of editing rules. A certain region is a set of attributes that are assured correct by the users. Given a certain region and master data, editing rules tell us what attributes to fix and how to update them. We show how the method can be used in data monitoring and enrichment. We develop techniques for reasoning about editing rules, to decide whether they lead to a unique fix and whether they are able to fix all the attributes in a tuple, relative to master data and a certain region. We also provide an algorithm to identify minimal certain regions, such that a certain fix is warranted by editing rules and master data as long as one of the regions is correct

Discovering Entities in Process Execution Logs

Töö on kirjutatud protsessikaeve valdkonnas Artefaktikeskse teenuste koosvõime projekti (ACSI) raames. Töö eesmärgiks oli luua meetod sündmuste logidest olemite avastamiseks ja seda meetodit rakendada. Loodud meetod on kirjutatud Javas ning kujutab endast pluginat ProM raamistikule. ProM on geneeriline avatud lähtekoodiga Java raamistik protsessikaeve algoritmide rakendamiseks pluginatena. Olemite leidmise protsessi saab jaotada järgmisteks sammudeks: 1. Integreerimine ProM-iga. 2. Sisendandmetest (XES formaadis logifailidest) sündmuste tüüpide relatsioonide koostamine. 3. Funktsionaalsete sõltuvuste leidmine sündmuste logide relatsioonilisest esitusest. Funktsionaalsete sõltuvuste leidmiseks kasutatakse algoritmi TANE. 4. Funktsionaalsete sõltuvuste alusel kandidaatvõtmete leidmine. Kui relatsioonil on mitu kandidaatvõtit, palutakse kasutajal valida neist üks primaarseks võtmeks. 5. Sama primaarse võtmega sündmustest moodustatakse üks olem. 6. Kasutajale esitatakse töö käigus moodustatud olemid väljundina või saadetakse need järgmisele algoritmile töötlemiseks. Meetodit testiti kahe logifaili puhul, milles olid andmed CD-poe näitel. Meetod töötas mõlema logifaili puhul korrektselt.The thesis is written in the field of process mining and in the frames of Artifact-Centric Service Interoperation (ACSI) project. The goal of the thesis was to create a method for discovering entities in process execution logs and to implement this method. The method is implemented as plugin for ProM open source process mining framework and is written in Java. This implementation can be divided into the following steps: 1. Integration with ProM. 2. Extracting the event type tables from the raw log input. 3. Finding functional dependencies from relational representation of event logs. The functional dependencies are found using an algorithm called TANE. 4. Finding the candidate keys from the functional dependencies. In case a relation has multiple candidate keys, the user is prompted to select one as primary key. 5. Grouping together the event types that have the same primary keys and integrating them into one entity. 6. The output is shown to the user or the entities are sent to another algorithm. Two different event log files were used to test this method. Both of these logs are based on the example of online CD-shop. The method was working correclty for the both event logs

Some combinatorial algorithms connecting hypergraphs

In the relational datamodel the combinatorial algorithms are constructed many authors. The hypergraph is a important concept in the combinatorial theory. The candidate keys play an essential role in the relational datamodel. In this paper, base on hypergraph we present a new combinatorial algorithm that finds all candidate keys of a give relation. Some another results related to the candidate keys are given