Abstract
Temporal functional dependencies add valid time to classical functional dependencies in order to express data integrity constraints over the flow of time. If the temporal dimension adopted is an interval, we have to deal with interval-based temporal functional dependencies (ITFDs for short), which consider different interval relations between tuple valid times. The related approximate problem is when we want to check whether our data satisfy, without any constraint for the schema, a given ITFD under a given error threshold \(0 \leqslant \epsilon \leqslant 1\). This can be rephrased as: given a relation instance r, is it possible to delete at most \(\epsilon \cdot |r|\) tuples from it in such a way that the resulting instance satisfies the given ITFD? This optimization problem, ITFD-Approx for short, may represent a way to discover (i.e., mine) important dependencies among attribute values in a database. In this paper we analyze the complexity of problem ITFD-Approx restricting ourselves to Allen’s interval relations: we shall see how the complexity of such a problem may significantly change, depending on the considered interval relation.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A function \(f:{\mathbb {N}}\rightarrow {\mathbb {N}}\) is super-additive if for every pair of elements \(x,y \in {\mathbb {N}}\) we have that \(f(x+y)\geqslant f(x) + f(y)\).
This is the formulation of the problem in its evaluation version and the same assumption made in Sect. 2.2 for \(\sim \)-MaxConsistent holds for Max2Sat too.
Notice that in the terminology of database repairing we have that boldfaced lower-case letters (e.g. \({\mathbf {x}}, {\mathbf {y}}, \ldots \)) denote sets of attributes while lower case letters (e.g. \(x, y, \ldots \)) denote a single attribute.
References
Afrati, F.N., Kolaitis, P.G.: Repair checking in inconsistent databases: algorithms and complexity. In: Fagin [15], pp. 31–41
Allen, James F.: Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Commun. ACM 26(11), 832–843 (1983)
Bettini, Claudio, Jajodia, Sushil G., Wang, Sean X.: Time Granularities in Databases, Data Mining and Temporal Reasoning. Springer-Verlag New York Inc., Secaucus, NJ (2000)
Bresolin, Davide, Goranko, Valentin, Montanari, Angelo, Sala, Pietro: Complete and terminating tableau for the logic of proper subinterval structures over dense orderings. Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 231, 131–151 (2009)
Bresolin, Davide, Goranko, Valentin, Montanari, Angelo, Sala, Pietro: Tableaux for logics of subinterval structures over dense orderings. J. Log. Comput. 20(1), 133–166 (2010)
Chomicki, Jan, Marcinkowski, Jerzy: Minimal-change integrity maintenance using tuple deletions. Inf. Comput. 197(1–2), 90–121 (2005)
Codd, E.F.: Normalized data structure: a brief tutorial. In: Codd, E.F., Dean, A.L. (eds.) SIGFIDET Workshop, pp. 1–17. ACM (1971)
Combi, Carlo, Keravnou-Papailiou, Elpida, Shahar, Yuval: Temporal Information Systems in Medicine. Springer-Verlag New York Inc., New York, NY (2010)
Combi, Carlo, Mantovani, Matteo, Sabaini, Alberto, Sala, Pietro, Amaddeo, Francesco, Moretti, Ugo, Pozzi, Giuseppe: Mining approximate temporal functional dependencies with pure temporal grouping in clinical databases. Comput. Biol. Med. 62, 306–324 (2015)
Combi, C., Montanari, A., Pozzi, G.: The T4SQL temporal query language. In: Silva, M.J., Laender, A.H.F., Baeza-Yates, R.A., McGuinness, D.L., Olstad, B., Olsen, Ø.H., Falcão, A. (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, (CIKM), Lisbon, Portugal, November 6–10, 2007, pp. 193–202. ACM (2007)
Combi, C., Montanari, A., Sala, P.: A uniform framework for temporal functional dependencies with multiple granularities. In: Pfoser, D., Tao, Y., Mouratidis, K., Nascimento, M.A., Mokbel, M.F., Shekhar, S., Huang, Y. (eds.) Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases—12th International Symposium, (SSTD) Minneapolis, MN, USA, August 24–26, 2011, Proceedings, volume 6849 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 404–421. Springer (2011)
Combi, C., Parise, P., Sala, P., Pozzi, G.: Mining approximate temporal functional dependencies based on pure temporal grouping. In: Ding, W., Washio, T., Xiong, H., Karypis, G., Thuraisingham, B.M., Cook, D.J., Wu, X. (eds.) 13th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshops, ICDM Workshops, TX, USA, December 7–10, 2013, pp. 258–265. IEEE Computer Society (2013)
Combi, C., Sala, P.: Temporal functional dependencies based on interval relations. In: Combi, C., Leucker, M., Wolter, F. (eds.) Eighteenth International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, (TIME), Lübeck , Germany, September 12–14, pp. 23–30. IEEE (2011)
Combi, Carlo, Sala, Pietro: Interval-based temporal functional dependencies: specification and verification. Ann. Math. Artif. Intell. 71(1–3), 85–130 (2014)
Fagin, R. (ed.): Database Theory—ICDT 2009, 12th International Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia, March 23–25, 2009, Proceedings, volume 361 of ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. ACM (2009)
Fontaine, G.: Why is it hard to obtain a dichotomy for consistent query answering? In: 28th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, (LICS), New Orleans, LA, USA, June 25–28, 2013, pp. 550–559. IEEE Computer Society (2013)
Garey, M.R., Johnson, David S., Stockmeyer, Larry J.: Some simplified np-complete graph problems. Theor. Comput. Sci. 1(3), 237–267 (1976)
Huhtala, Y., Kärkkäinen, J., Porkka, P., Toivonen, H.: Efficient discovery of functional and approximate dependencies using partitions. In: Urban, S.D., Bertino, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Orlando, Florida, USA, February 23–27, 1998, pp. 392–401. IEEE Computer Society (1998)
Huhtala, Ykä, Kärkkäinen, Juha, Porkka, Pasi, Toivonen, Hannu: Tane: An efficient algorithm for discovering functional and approximate dependencies. Comput. J. 42(2), 100–111 (1999)
Jensen, C.S., Snodgrass, R.T.: Temporal database. In: Liu and Özsu [24], pp. 2957–2960
Jensen, Christian S., Snodgrass, Richard T., Soo, Michael D.: Extending existing dependency theory to temporal databases. IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 8(4), 563–582 (1996)
Kivinen, Jyrki, Mannila, Heikki: Approximate inference of functional dependencies from relations. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 149(1), 129–149 (1995)
Kolahi, S., Lakshmanan, L.V.S.: On approximating optimum repairs for functional dependency violations. In: Fagin [15], pp. 53–62
Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds.): Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Berlin (2009)
Mannila, Heikki, Räihä, Kari-Jouko: On the complexity of inferring functional dependencies. Discrete Appl. Math. 40(2), 237–243 (1992)
Mannila, Heikki, Räihä, Kari-Jouko: Algorithms for inferring functional dependencies from relations. Data Knowl. Eng. 12(1), 83–99 (1994)
Marcinkowski, Jerzy, Michaliszyn, Jakub: The undecidability of the logic of subintervals. Fundam. Inform. 131(2), 217–240 (2014)
Papadimitriou, Christos H., Steiglitz, Kenneth: Combinatorial Optimization: Algorithms and Complexity. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River (1982)
Sala, P.: Approximate interval-based temporal dependencies: the complexity landscape. In: Cesta, A., Combi, C., Laroussinie, F. (eds.) 21st International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, TIME 2014, Verona, Italy, September 8–10, 2014, pp. 69–78. IEEE Computer Society (2014)
Venema, Yde: A modal logic for chopping intervals. J. Log. Comput. 1(4), 453–476 (1991)
Vianu, Victor: Dynamic functional dependencies and database aging. J. ACM 34(1), 28–59 (1987)
Wang, Xiaoyang Sean, Bettini, Claudio, Brodsky, Alexander, Jajodia, Sushil: Logical design for temporal databases with multiple granularities. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 22(2), 115–170 (1997)
Wijsen, Jef: Temporal fds on complex objects. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 24(1), 127–176 (1999)
Wijsen, J.: Temporal dependencies. In: Liu and Özsu [24], pp. 2960–2966
Wijsen, J.: Temporal integrity constraints. In: Liu and Özsu [24], pp. 2976–2982
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethical statement
Pietro Sala is founded by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, Pharmacology section both of the University of Verona, in the context of the project “An interval-based approach for data analysis and workflow modelling in medical domains”.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Combi, C., Sala, P. Mining approximate interval-based temporal dependencies. Acta Informatica 53, 547–585 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-015-0246-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-015-0246-x