Probabilistic Database Model Research Articles

A Hybrid Relational Database Model for Uncertain and Imprecise Information

Recent years, many fuzzy or probabilistic database models have been built for representing and handling imprecise or uncertain information of objects in real-world applications. However, relational database models combining the relevance and strength of both fuzzy set and probability theories have rarely been proposed. This paper introduces a new relational database model, as a hybrid one combining consistently fuzzy set theory and probability theory for modeling and manipulating uncertain and imprecise information, where the uncertainty and imprecision of a relational attribute value are represented by a fuzzy probabilistic triple, the computation and combination of relational attribute values are implemented by using the probabilistic interpretation of binary relations on fuzzy sets, and the elimination of redundant data is dealt with by coalescing e-equivalent tuples. The basic concepts of the classical relational database model are extended in this new model. Then the relational algebraic operations are formally defined accordingly. A set of the properties of the relational algebraic operations is also formulated and proven.

Capturing continuous data and answering aggregate queries in probabilistic XML

Sources of data uncertainty and imprecision are numerous. A way to handle this uncertainty is to associate probabilistic annotations to data. Many such probabilistic database models have been proposed, both in the relational and in the semi-structured setting. The latter is particularly well adapted to the management of uncertain data coming from a variety of automatic processes. An important problem, in the context of probabilistic XML databases, is that of answering aggregate queries (count, sum, avg, etc.), which has received limited attention so far. In a model unifying the various (discrete) semi-structured probabilistic models studied up to now, we present algorithms to compute the distribution of the aggregation values (exploiting some regularity properties of the aggregate functions) and probabilistic moments (especially expectation and variance) of this distribution. We also prove the intractability of some of these problems and investigate approximation techniques. We finally extend the discrete model to a continuous one, in order to take into account continuous data values, such as measurements from sensor networks, and extend our algorithms and complexity results to the continuous case.

PrDB: managing and exploiting rich correlations in probabilistic databases

Due to numerous applications producing noisy data, e.g., sensor data, experimental data, data from uncurated sources, information extraction, etc., there has been a surge of interest in the development of probabilistic databases. Most probabilistic database models proposed to date, however, fail to meet the challenges of real-world applications on two counts: (1) they often restrict the kinds of uncertainty that the user can represent; and (2) the query processing algorithms often cannot scale up to the needs of the application. In this work, we define a probabilistic database model, PrDB, that uses graphical models, a state-of-the-art probabilistic modeling technique developed within the statistics and machine learning community, to model uncertain data. We show how this results in a rich, complex yet compact probabilistic database model, which can capture the commonly occurring uncertainty models (tuple uncertainty, attribute uncertainty), more complex models (correlated tuples and attributes) and allows compact representation (shared and schema-level correlations). In addition, we show how query evaluation in PrDB translates into inference in an appropriately augmented graphical model. This allows us to easily use any of a myriad of exact and approximate inference algorithms developed within the graphical modeling community. While probabilistic inference provides a generic approach to solving queries, we show how the use of shared correlations, together with a novel inference algorithm that we developed based on bisimulation, can speed query processing significantly. We present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the proposed techniques and show that even with a few shared correlations, significant speedups are possible.