Independence in Infinite Probabilistic Databases

Abstract

Probabilistic databases (PDBs) model uncertainty in data. The current standard is to view PDBs as finite probability spaces over relational database instances. Since many attributes in typical databases have infinite domains, such as integers, strings, or real numbers, it is often more natural to view PDBs as infinite probability spaces over database instances. In this article, we lay the mathematical foundations of infinite probabilistic databases. Our focus then is on independence assumptions. Tuple-independent PDBs play a central role in theory and practice of PDBs. Here we study infinite tuple-independent PDBs as well as related models such as infinite block-independent disjoint PDBs. While the standard model of PDBs focuses on a set-based semantics, we also study tuple-independent PDBs with a bag semantics and independence in PDBs over uncountable fact spaces. We also propose a new approach to PDBs with an open-world assumption, addressing issues raised by Ceylan et al. (Proc. KR 2016) and generalizing their work, which is still rooted in finite tuple-independent PDBs. Moreover, for countable PDBs we propose an approximate query answering algorithm.