Truth discovery on inconsistent relational data

Abstract

In this era of big data, data are often collected from multiple sources that have different reliabilities, and there is inevitable conflict with respect to the various information obtained when it relates to the the same object. One important task is to identify the most trustworthy value out of all the conflicting claims, and this is known as truth discovery. Existing truth discovery methods simultaneously identify the most trustworthy information and source reliability degrees and are based on the idea that more reliable sources often provide more trustworthy information, and vice versa. However, there are often semantic constrains defined upon relational database, which can be violated by a single data source. To remove violations, an important task is to repair data to satisfy the constrains, and this is known as data cleaning. The two problems above may coexist, but considering them together can provide some benefits, and to the authors knowledge, this has not yet been the focus of any research. In this paper, therefore, a schema-decomposing based method is proposed to simultaneously discover the truth and to clean the data, with the aim of improving accuracy. Experimental results using real world data sets of notebooks and mobile phones, as well as simulated data sets, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.