Causal What-If and How-To Analysis Using HYPER

Abstract

What-if and How-to queries are fundamental data analysis questions that provide insights about the effects of a hypothetical update without actually making changes to the database. Traditional systems assume independence across different tuples and non-updated attributes of the database. However, different attributes and tuples are generally dependent in realworld scenarios. We propose to demonstrate HYPER, a novel system to efficiently answer what-if and how-to queries while capturing causal dependencies among different attributes and tuples in the database. To compute the results, HYPER leverages a suite of optimizations along with techniques from causal inference to effectively estimate the answers. HYPER allows users to formulate complex hypothetical queries by using a novel SQLlike syntax and presents the output as interactive visualizations that can be explored and analyzed with ease.

Publication
In ICDE, 2023

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