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Data smells: categories, causes and consequences, and detection of suspicious data in AI-based systems

Authors:

Michael Felderer,

Rudolf RamlerAuthors Info & Claims

CAIN '22: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI Engineering: Software Engineering for AI

Pages 229 - 239

https://doi.org/10.1145/3522664.3528590

Published: 17 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

High data quality is fundamental for today's AI-based systems. However, although data quality has been an object of research for decades, there is a clear lack of research on potential data quality issues (e.g., ambiguous, extraneous values). These kinds of issues are latent in nature and thus often not obvious. Nevertheless, they can be associated with an increased risk of future problems in AI-based systems (e.g., technical debt, data-induced faults). As a counterpart to code smells in software engineering, we refer to such issues as Data Smells. This article conceptualizes data smells and elaborates on their causes, consequences, detection, and use in the context of AI-based systems. In addition, a catalogue of 36 data smells divided into three categories (i.e., Believability Smells, Understandability Smells, Consistency Smells) is presented. Moreover, the article outlines tool support for detecting data smells and presents the result of an initial smell detection on more than 240 real-world datasets.

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cover image ACM Conferences

CAIN '22: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI Engineering: Software Engineering for AI

May 2022

254 pages

ISBN:9781450392754

DOI:10.1145/3522664

General Chair:
Ivica Crnkovic
Chalmers University of Technology, SE

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Published: 17 October 2022

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CAIN '22: 1st Conference on AI Engineering - Software Engineering for AI

May 16 - 24, 2022

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