Causality-Based Scores Alignment in Explainable Data Management

Abstract

Different attribution scores have been proposed to quantify the relevance of database tuples for query answering in databases; e.g. Causal Responsibility, the Shapley Value, the Banzhaf Power-Index, and the Causal Effect. They have been analyzed in isolation. This work is a first investigation of score alignment depending on the query and the database; i.e. on whether they induce compatible rankings of tuples. We concentrate mostly on causality-based scores; and provide a syntactic dichotomy result for queries: on one side, pairs of scores are always aligned, on the other, they are not always aligned. It turns out that the presence of exogenous tuples makes a crucial difference in this regard.