COBRA: Compression via Abstraction of Provenance for Hypothetical Reasoning

Abstract: Data analytics often involves hypothetical reasoning: repeatedly modifying the data and observing the induced effect on the computation result of a data-centric application. Recent work has proposed to leverage ideas from data provenance tracking towards supporting efficient hypothetical reasoning: instead of a costly re-execution of the underlying application, one may assign values to a pre-computed provenance expression. A prime challenge in leveraging this approach for large-scale data and complex applications lies in the size of the provenance. To this end, we present a framework that allows to reduce provenance size. Our approach is based on reducing the provenance granularity using abstraction. We propose a demonstration of COBRA, a system that allows examine the effect of the provenance compression on the anticipated analysis results. We will demonstrate the usefulness of COBRA in the context of business data analysis.