Discovering data quality rules

Dirty data is a serious problem for businesses leading to incorrect decision making, inefficient daily operations, and ultimately wasting both time and money. Dirty data often arises when domain constraints and business rules, meant to preserve data consistency and accuracy, are enforced incompletely or not at all in application code. In this work, we propose a new data-driven tool that can be used within an organization's data quality management process to suggest possible rules, and to identify conformant and non-conformant records. Data quality rules are known to be contextual, so we focus on the discovery of context-dependent rules. Specifically, we search for conditional functional dependencies (CFDs), that is, functional dependencies that hold only over a portion of the data. The output of our tool is a set of functional dependencies together with the context in which they hold (for example, a rule that states for CS graduate courses, the course number and term functionally...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Fei Chiang, Renée J. Miller
• Keywords: Data Quality, Dirty Data, Functional Dependencies, PVLDB 2008