Biblio

Integrity constraints, guiding the cleaning of dirty data, are often found to be imprecise as well. Existing studies consider the inaccurate constraints that are oversimplified, and thus refine the constraints via inserting more predicates (attributes). We note that imprecise constraints may not only be oversimplified so that correct data are erroneously identified as violations, but also could be overrefined that the constraints overfit the data and fail to identify true violations. In the latter case, deleting excessive predicates applies. To address the oversimplified and overrefined constraint inaccuracies, in this paper, we propose to repair data by allowing a small variation (with both predicate insertion and deletion) on the constraints. A novel θ-tolerant repair model is introduced, which returns a (minimum) data repair that satisfies at least one variant of the constraints (with constraint variation no greater than θ compared to the given constraints). To efficiently repair data among various constraint variants, we propose a single round, sharing enabled approach. Results on real data sets demonstrate that our proposal can capture more accurate data repairs compared to the existing methods with/without constraint repairs.

Errors are prevalent in data sequences, such as GPS trajectories or sensor readings. Existing methods on cleaning sequential data employ a constraint on value changing speeds and perform constraint-based repairing. While such speed constraints are effective in identifying large spike errors, the small errors that do not significantly deviate from the truth and indeed satisfy the speed constraints can hardly be identified and repaired. To handle such small errors, in this paper, we propose a statistical based cleaning method. Rather than declaring a broad constraint of max/min speeds, we model the probability distribution of speed changes. The repairing problem is thus to maximize the likelihood of the sequence w.r.t. the probability of speed changes. We formalize the likelihood-based cleaning problem, show its NP-hardness, devise exact algorithms, and propose several approximate/heuristic methods to trade off effectiveness for efficiency. Experiments on real data sets (in various applications) demonstrate the superiority of our proposal.