Cardinality Constraints with Probabilistic Intervals

Abstract

Probabilistic databases accommodate well the requirements of modern applications that produce large volumes of uncertain data from a variety of sources. We propose an expressive class of probabilistic cardinality constraints which empowers users to specify lower and upper bounds on the marginal probabilities by which cardinality constraints should hold in a data set of acceptable quality. The bounds help organizations balance the consistency and completeness targets for their data quality, and provide probabilities on the number of query answers without querying the data. Algorithms are established for an agile schema-driven acquisition of the right lower and upper bounds in a given application domain, and for reasoning about the constraints.