arXiv · 2609.26692
Databases with Missing Values that are Governed by Missingness Mechanisms
Abstract
We address the problems of giving a semantics to a relational database (RDB) that has missing values (MVs). The causes for the latter are governed by a Missingness Mechanism that is modelled as a Bayesian Network (BN) that involves the DB attributes as variables. The BN is called a Missingness Graph (MG). Our approach considerable departs from the treatment of RDBs with NULL (values). The combination of the MG and the observed DB allows us to build a block-independent probabilistic DB. We identify two optimal classes of its possible worlds on which QA can be performed. Those classes jointly capture probabilistic uncertainty and statistical plausibility of the implicit imputation of MVs. We obtain tractability results for the computation of some optimal classes; and we also obtain complexity results that characterize the computational feasibility of our approach.
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Leopoldo Bertossi, Farouk Toumani. 2026-09-22. Databases with Missing Values that are Governed by Missingness Mechanisms. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26692
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