An Investigation of the Cost and Accuracy Tradeoffs of Supplanting AFDs with Bayes Network in Query Processing in the Presence of Incompleteness in Autonomous Databases

As the information available to lay users through autonomous data sources continues to increase, mediators become important to ensure that the wealth of information available is tapped effectively. A key challenge that these information mediators need to handle is the varying levels of incompleteness in the underlying databases in terms of missing attribute values. Existing approaches such as Query Processing over Incomplete Autonomous Databases (QPIAD) aim to mine and use Approximate Functional Dependencies (AFDs) to predict and retrieve relevant incomplete tuples. These approaches make independence assumptions about missing values—which critically hobbles their performance when there are tuples containing missing values for multiple correlated attributes. In this thesis, I present a principled probabilistic alternative that views an incomplete tuple as defining a distribution over the complete tuples that it stands for. I learn this distribution in terms of Bayes networks. My approach involves mining/”learning” Bayes networks from a sample of the database, and using it do both imputation (predict a missing value) and query rewriting (retrieve relevant results with incompleteness on the query-constrained attributes, when the data sources are autonomous). I present empirical studies to demonstrate that (i) at higher levels of incompleteness, when multiple attribute values are missing, Bayes networks do provide a significantly higher classification accuracy and (ii) the relevant possible answers retrieved by the queries reformulated using Bayes networks provide higher precision and recall than AFDs while keeping query processing costs manageable.