# Causes for Query Answers from Databases: Datalog Abduction, View-Updates, and Integrity Constraints

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Explaining k-Nearest Neighbors: Abductive and Counterfactual Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06078/) (2025)
- [From Database Repairs to Causality in Databases and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09374/) (2023)
- [Score-Based Explanations in Data Management and Machine Learning: An Answer-Set Programming Approach to Counterfactual Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10562/) (2021)
- [Attribution-Scores and Causal Counterfactuals as Explanations in Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02829/) (2023)
- [The Causal-Effect Score in Data Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02495/) (2025)
- [Causality-Based Scores Alignment in Explainable Data Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14469/) (2025)
- [Sufficient Explanations in Databases and their Connections to Database Repairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15623/) (2025)
- [Reconciling Consistency-Based Diagnosis with Actual-Causality-Based Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08688/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize, and possibly compute causes for query answers. Connections between QA-causality and consistency-based diagnosis and database repairs (wrt. integrity constraint violations) have already been established. In this work we establish precise connections between QA-causality and both abductive diagnosis and the view-update problem in databases, allowing us to obtain new algorithmic and complexity results for QA-causality. We also obtain new results on the complexity of view-conditioned causality, and investigate the notion of QA-causality in the presence of integrity constraints, obtaining complexity results from a connection with view-conditioned causality. The abduction connection under integrity constraints allows us to obtain algorithmic tools for QA-causality.