A Probabilistic Multidimensional Data Model and Algebra for OLAP in Decision Support Systems

Although there are models defmed for multidimensional data, they lack a comprehensive way to handle uncertain data. Uncertainty is pervasive over the real world and any model to represent real world data that ignores uncertainty imposes unacceptable limitations on the decision support systems in which it is used. No methods were proposed so far to incorporate uncertainty into multidimensional data models. We propose a probabilistic multidimensional data model and an associated algebra to handle uncertainty.