Attribution Score Alignment in Explainable Data Management

Different attribution-scores have been proposed to quantify the relevance of database tuples for a query answer from a database. Among them, we find Causal Responsibility, the Shapley Value, the Banzhaf Power-Index, and the Causal Effect. They have been analyzed in isolation, mainly in terms of computational properties. In this work, we start an investigation into the alignment of these scores on the basis of the queries at hand; that is, on whether they induce compatible rankings of tuples. We are able to identify vast classes of queries for which some pairs of scores are always aligned, and others for which they are not. It turns out that the presence of exogenous tuples makes a crucial difference in this regard.

The Causal-Effect Score in Data Management

The Causal Effect (CE) is a numerical measure of causal influence of variables on observed results. Despite being widely used in many areas, only preliminary attempts have been made to use CE as an attribution score in data management, to measure the causal strength of tuples for query answering in databases. In this work, we introduce, generalize and investigate the so-called Causal-Effect Score in the context of classical and probabilistic databases.