Rule-Based Conditioning of Probabilistic Data

Maurice van Keulen, Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Christoph Matheja, Joost-Pieter Katoen

Abstract: Data interoperability is a major issue in data management for data science and big data analytics. Probabilistic data integration (PDI) is a specific kind of data integration where extraction and integration problems such as inconsistency and uncertainty are handled by means of a probabilistic data representation. This allows a data integration process with two phases: (1) a quick partial integration where data quality problems are represented as uncertainty in the resulting integrated data, and (2) using the uncertain data and continuously improving its quality as more evidence is gathered. The main contribution of this paper is an iterative approach for incorporating evidence of users in the probabilistically integrated data. Evidence can be specified as hard or soft rules (i.e., rules that are uncertain themselves).