Integrating and Ranking Uncertain Scientific Data

Mediator-based data integration systems resolve exploratory queries by joining data elements across sources. In the presence of uncertainties, such multiple expansions can quickly lead to spurious connections and incorrect results. The BioRank project investigates formalisms for modeling uncertainty during scientific data integration and for ranking uncertain query results. Our motivating application is protein function prediction. In this paper we show that: (i) explicit modeling of uncertainties as probabilities increases our ability to predict less-known or previously unknown functions (though it does not improve predicting the well-known). This suggests that probabilistic uncertainty models offer utility for scientific knowledge discovery; (ii) small perturbations in the input probabilities tend to produce only minor changes in the quality of our result rankings. This suggests that our methods are robust against slight variations in the way uncertainties are transformed into probab...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Landon Detwiler, Wolfgang Gatterbauer, Brenton Louie, Dan Suciu, Peter Tarczy-Hornoch
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2009, Probabilistic Query Evaluation, Probabilistic Rankings, Probabilistic Uncertainty Models, Ranking Uncertain Query, Way Uncertainties