Efficient Computation of Statistical Significance of Query Results in Databases

  • Authors:
  • Vishwakarma Singh;Arnab Bhattacharya;Ambuj K. Singh

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), Kanpur, India;Department of Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

  • Venue:
  • SSDBM '08 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Queries such as database similarity searches return results satisfying certain properties of distances or scores. For domain scientists, the absolute values of scores are seldom sufficient. Statistical significance or p-valueof the result is a more useful criterion. This can be computed using an appropriate model of random objects. The problem of computing p-values becomes more acute when queries have multiple components. In this case, the returned score is an aggregate of individual scores. The simple way of calculating the p-value by enumerating all random possibilities fails for large database and query sizes. We propose an efficient method to calculate the approximate p-value of a multi-attribute result when the distribution of scores for the database objects is non-parametric. Experimental evaluation on large databases shows that our method is practical, runs 5 orders of magnitude faster than the basic approach, and has an error of less than 5% in p-value computation.