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In this paper, we model an objective function as a black-box function and propose BOExplain, a novel framework for explaining inference queries using Bayesian optimization (BO). An explanation is a predicate defining the input tuples that should be removed so that the query result of interest is significantly affected. BO --- a technique for finding the global optimum of a black-box function --- is used to find the best predicate. We develop two new techniques (individual contribution encoding and warm start) to handle categorical variables. We perform experiments showing that the predicates found by BOExplain have a higher degree of explanation compared to those found by the state-of-the-art query explanation engines. We also show that BOExplain is effective at deriving explanations for inference queries from source and training data on a variety of real-world datasets. BOExplain is open-sourced as a Python package at https:\/\/github.com\/sfu-db\/BOExplain.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.14778\/3476249.3476304","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,27]],"date-time":"2021-10-27T16:46:23Z","timestamp":1635353183000},"page":"2576-2585","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":7,"title":["Explaining inference queries with bayesian optimization"],"prefix":"10.14778","volume":"14","author":[{"given":"Brandon","family":"Lockhart","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jinglin","family":"Peng","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Weiyuan","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Jiannan","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Simon Fraser University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Eugene","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Columbia University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,27]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Firas Abuzaid Peter Kraft Sahaana Suri Edward Gan Eric Xu Atul Shenoy Asvin Ananthanarayan John Sheu Erik Meijer Xi Wu etal 2020. 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