G <scp>uardrail</scp> : Automated Integrity Constraint Synthesis From Noisy Data

Data quality issues have been a long-standing challenge in the database community. Erroneous data can lead to incorrect query results, which in turn affect the credibility of the data-driven decisions. To circumvent this issue, a common practice is to discovery integrity constraints and enforce them on the data to ensure its quality. For instance, one can use constraints entailed by functional dependencies (FDs) to detect violations in the data. However, existing approaches fail to effectively discover them from noisy data. In this paper, we present a novel form of integrity constraints as a program under a domain-specific language (DSL) that can be used to detect and rectify errors in the data. On top of DSL, we propose an efficient synthesis algorithm that leverages the statistical structural properties of the data to generate the sketch of the program that significantly reduces the search space and speedup the synthesis process. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we evaluate it on 12 real-world datasets for error detection. Then, we show that the synthesized integrity constraints can be used to solidify ML-integrated SQL queries over 48 queries, leading to an average reduction of 87% in the error rates. Our open-source artifact, including the G uardrail framework and the datasets, is available for the community to use [2].

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Published
2025-09-22
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3749166
Primary Topic
Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

G uardrail : Automated Integrity Constraint Synthesis From Noisy Data

Zhaoyu Wang, Zhenlan Ji, Shuai Wang, Ao Sun et al.
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data
Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications
article

G uardrail : Automated Integrity Constraint Synthesis From Noisy Data

Zhaoyu Wang, Zhenlan Ji, Shuai Wang, Ao Sun, Pingchuan Ma, Zongjie Li
article en

Abstract

Data quality issues have been a long-standing challenge in the database community. Erroneous data can lead to incorrect query results, which in turn affect the credibility of the data-driven decisions. To circumvent this issue, a common practice is to discovery integrity constraints and enforce them on the data to ensure its quality. For instance, one can use constraints entailed by functional dependencies (FDs) to detect violations in the data. However, existing approaches fail to effectively discover them from noisy data. In this paper, we present a novel form of integrity constraints as a program under a domain-specific language (DSL) that can be used to detect and rectify errors in the data. On top of DSL, we propose an efficient synthesis algorithm that leverages the statistical structural properties of the data to generate the sketch of the program that significantly reduces the search space and speedup the synthesis process. To demonstrate the usefulness of our approach, we evaluate it on 12 real-world datasets for error detection. Then, we show that the synthesized integrity constraints can be used to solidify ML-integrated SQL queries over 48 queries, leading to an average reduction of 87% in the error rates. Our open-source artifact, including the G uardrail framework and the datasets, is available for the community to use [2].

Proceedings of the ACM on Management of DataVol. 3(4)
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
Openalex Percentile: Top 86%
Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications
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