The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers

An answer to a query has a well-defined lineage expression (alternatively called how-provenance) that explains how the answer was derived. Recent work has also shown how to compute the lineage of a non-answer to a query. However, the cause of an answer or non-answer is a more subtle notion and consists, in general, of only a fragment of the lineage. In this paper, we adapt Halpern, Pearl, and Chockler's recent definitions of causality and responsibility to define the causes of answers and non-answers to queries, and their degree of responsibility. Responsibility captures the notion of degree of causality and serves to rank potentially many causes by their relative contributions to the effect. Then, we study the complexity of computing causes and responsibilities for conjunctive queries. It is known that computing causes is NP-complete in general. Our first main result shows that all causes to conjunctive queries can be computed by a relational query which may involve negation. Th...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Alexandra Meliou, Wolfgang Gatterbauer, Katherine F. Moore, Dan Suciu
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, Relational Query, Subtle Notion, Well-defined Lineage Expression