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Main Authors: Jung, Philipp, Chandler, Nicholas, Jäger, Sebastian, Biessmann, Felix
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04138
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author Jung, Philipp
Chandler, Nicholas
Jäger, Sebastian
Biessmann, Felix
author_facet Jung, Philipp
Chandler, Nicholas
Jäger, Sebastian
Biessmann, Felix
contents Data quality monitoring is a core challenge in modern information processing systems. While many approaches to detect data errors or shifts have been proposed, few studies investigate the mechanisms governing error generation. We argue that knowing how errors were generated can be key to tracing and fixing them. In this study, we build on existing work in the statistics literature on missing values and propose MechDetect, a simple algorithm to investigate error generation mechanisms. Given a tabular data set and a corresponding error mask, the algorithm estimates whether or not the errors depend on the data using machine learning models. Our work extends established approaches to detect mechanisms underlying missing values and can be readily applied to other error types, provided that an error mask is available. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MechDetect in experiments on established benchmark datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04138
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MechDetect: Detecting Data-Dependent Errors
Jung, Philipp
Chandler, Nicholas
Jäger, Sebastian
Biessmann, Felix
Machine Learning
Databases
Information Retrieval
Data quality monitoring is a core challenge in modern information processing systems. While many approaches to detect data errors or shifts have been proposed, few studies investigate the mechanisms governing error generation. We argue that knowing how errors were generated can be key to tracing and fixing them. In this study, we build on existing work in the statistics literature on missing values and propose MechDetect, a simple algorithm to investigate error generation mechanisms. Given a tabular data set and a corresponding error mask, the algorithm estimates whether or not the errors depend on the data using machine learning models. Our work extends established approaches to detect mechanisms underlying missing values and can be readily applied to other error types, provided that an error mask is available. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MechDetect in experiments on established benchmark datasets.
title MechDetect: Detecting Data-Dependent Errors
topic Machine Learning
Databases
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04138