The DOI matches its Crossref record; 15 of the 15 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A Bayesian approach to discovering truth from conflicting sources for data integration
Abstract
In practical data integration systems, it is common for the data sources being integrated to provide conflicting information about the same entity. Consequently, a major challenge for data integration is to derive the most complete and accurate integrated records from diverse and sometimes conflicting sources. We term this challenge the truth finding problem . We observe that some sources are generally more reliable than others, and therefore a good model of source quality is the key to solving the truth finding problem. In this work, we propose a probabilistic graphical model that can automatically infer true records and source quality without any supervision. In contrast to previous methods, our principled approach leverages a generative process of two types of errors (false positive and false negative) by modeling two different aspects of source quality. In so doing, ours is also the first approach designed to merge multi-valued attribute types. Our method is scalable, due to an efficient sampling-based inference algorithm that needs very few iterations in practice and enjoys linear time complexity, with an even faster incremental variant. Experiments on two real world datasets show that our new method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches to the truth finding problem.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Artificial intelligence: a modern approach
(1995) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.33-1577 · Cited by 21,974
Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment
Kleinberg, J. M. (1999) · Journal of the ACM · doi:10.1145/324133.324140 · Cited by 9,032
Consistent query answers in inconsistent databases
Arenas, M., Bertossi, L., & Chomicki, J. (1999) · doi:10.1145/303976.303983 · Cited by 868
Corroborating information from disagreeing views
Galland, A., Abiteboul, S., Marian, A., & Senellart, P. P. (2010) · ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) · doi:10.1145/1718487.1718504 · Cited by 321
Integrating conflicting data: the role of source dependence
Dong, X. L., Berti-Equille, L., & Srivastava, D. (2009) · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · doi:10.14778/1687627.1687690 · Cited by 312
Knowing What to Believe (when you already know something)
Pasternack, J., & Roth, D. (2010) · Cited by 276
Truth discovery with multiple conflicting information providers on the web
Yin, X., Han, J., & Yu, P. S. (2007) · ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) · doi:10.1145/1281192.1281309 · Cited by 185
Self-citationSemi-supervised truth discovery
Yin, X., & Tan, W. (2011) · International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) · doi:10.1145/1963405.1963439 · Cited by 176
Truth discovery and copying detection in a dynamic world
Dong, X. L., Berti-Equille, L., & Srivastava, D. (2009) · Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment · doi:10.14778/1687627.1687691 · Cited by 146
Using Probabilistic Information in Data Integration
Florescu, D., Koller, D., & Levy, A. Y. (1997) · Cited by 95
Cited by
Resolving conflicts in heterogeneous data by truth discovery and source reliability estimation
Li, Q., Li, Y., Gao, J., Zhao, B., Fan, W., & Han, J. (2014) · Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data · doi:10.1145/2588555.2610509 · Cited by 426
Self-citationLi, Y., Gao, J., Meng, C., Li, Q., Su, L., Zhao, B., Fan, W., & Han, J. (2016) · ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter · doi:10.1145/2897350.2897352 · Cited by 336
Self-citationLeveraging the Crowd to Detect and Reduce the Spread of Fake News and Misinformation
Kim, J., Tabibian, B., Oh, A., Schölkopf, B., & Gomez-Rodriguez, M. (2018) · Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining · doi:10.1145/3159652.3159734 · Cited by 230
Fake News Detection in Social Networks via Crowd Signals
Tschiatschek, S., Singla, A., Gomez Rodriguez, M., Merchant, A., & Krause, A. (2018) · Companion of the The Web Conference 2018 on The Web Conference 2018 - WWW '18 · doi:10.1145/3184558.3188722 · Cited by 229
Influence-Aware Truth Discovery
Zhang, H., Li, Q., Ma, F., Xiao, H., Li, Y., Gao, J., & Su, L. (2016) · Proceedings of the 25th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management · doi:10.1145/2983323.2983785 · Cited by 26
Metadata
- Authors
- Zhao, B., Rubinstein, B. I. P., Gemmell, J., & Han, J.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
- Published
- 2012-02
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 550-561
- ISSN
- 2150-8097
- Cited by
- 264
- References
- 15
- Language
- en
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Bayesian approach to discovering truth from conflicting sources for data integration. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.14778/2168651.2168656
- The paper
- Zhao, B., Rubinstein, B. I. P., Gemmell, J., & Han, J. (2012). A Bayesian approach to discovering truth from conflicting sources for data integration. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. https://doi.org/10.14778/2168651.2168656
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.