Felipe Azua

Felipe Azua, Leopoldo Bertossi

The Causal Effect (CE) is a numerical measure of causal influence of variables on observed results. Despite being widely used in many areas, only preliminary attempts have been made to use CE as an attribution score in data management, to measure the causal strength of tuples for query answering in databases. In this work, we introduce, generalize and investigate the so-called Causal-Effect Score in the context of classical and probabilistic databases.

Felipe Azua, Leopoldo Bertossi

Different attribution scores have been proposed to quantify the relevance of database tuples for query answering in databases; e.g. Causal Responsibility, the Shapley Value, the Banzhaf Power-Index, and the Causal Effect. They have been analyzed in isolation. This work is a first investigation of score alignment depending on the query and the database; i.e. on whether they induce compatible rankings of tuples. We concentrate mostly on causality-based scores; and provide a syntactic dichotomy result for queries: on one side, pairs of scores are always aligned, on the other, they are not always aligned. It turns out that the presence of exogenous tuples makes a crucial difference in this regard.