Sufficient Explanations in Databases and their Connections to Necessary Explanations and Repairs
This work addresses theoretical foundations for database explanations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing causality formalizations.
The paper tackled the problem of formalizing sufficient explanations for query answers in relational databases, connecting them to database repairs and necessary explanations, and provided computational results.
The notion of cause, as formalized by Halpern and Pearl, has been recently applied to relational databases, to characterize and compute causal explanations for query answers. In this work we consider the alternative notion of sufficient explanation. We investigate its connections with database repairs as used for dealing with inconsistent databases, and with causality-based necessary explanations. We also obtain some computational results.