Dependable Data Repairing with Fixing Rules

Abstract

One of the main challenges that data-cleaning systems face is to automatically identify and repair data errors in a dependable manner. Though data dependencies (also known as integrity constraints) have been widely studied to capture errors in data, automated and dependable data repairing on these errors has remained a notoriously difficult problem. In this work, we introduce an automated approach for dependably repairing data errors, based on a novel class of fixing rules. A fixing rule contains an evidence pattern, a set of negative patterns, and a fact value. The heart of fixing rules is deterministic: given a tuple, the evidence pattern and the negative patterns of a fixing rule are combined to precisely capture which attribute is wrong, and the fact indicates how to correct this error. We study several fundamental problems associated with fixing rules and establish their complexity. We develop efficient algorithms to check whether a set of fixing rules are consistent and discuss approaches to resolve inconsistent fixing rules. We also devise efficient algorithms for repairing data errors using fixing rules. Moreover, we discuss approaches on how to generate a large number of fixing rules from examples or available knowledge bases. We experimentally demonstrate that our techniques outperform other automated algorithms in terms of the accuracy of repairing data errors, using both real-life and synthetic data.