Discovery of Paradigm Dependencies

Abstract: Missing and incorrect values often cause serious consequences. To deal with these data quality problems, a class of common employed tools are dependency rules, such as Functional Dependencies (FDs), Conditional Functional Dependencies (CFDs) and Edition Rules (ERs), etc. The stronger expressing ability a dependency has, data with the better quality can be obtained. To the best of our knowledge, all previous dependencies treat each attribute value as a non-splittable whole. Actually however, in many applications, part of a value may contains meaningful information, indicating that more powerful dependency rules to handle data quality problems are possible. In this paper, we consider of discovering such type of dependencies in which the left hand side is part of a regular-expression-like paradigm, named Paradigm Dependencies (PDs). PDs tell that if a string matches the paradigm, element at the specified position can decides a certain other attribute's value. We propose a framework in which strings with similar coding rules and different lengths are clustered together and aligned vertically, from which PDs can be discovered directly. The aligning problem is the key component of this framework and is proved in NP-Complete. A greedy algorithm is introduced in which the clustering and aligning tasks can be accomplished simultaneously. Because of the greedy algorithm's high time complexity, several pruning strategies are proposed to reduce the running time. In the experimental study, three real datasets as well as several synthetical datasets are employed to verify our methods' effectiveness and efficiency.