Nexus: Correlation Discovery over Collections of Spatio-Temporal Tabular Data

Abstract

Causal analysis is essential for gaining insights into complex real-world processes and making informed decisions. However, performing accurate causal analysis on observational data is generally infeasible, and therefore, domain experts start exploration with the identification of correlations. The increased availability of data from open government websites, organizations, and scientific studies presents an opportunity to harness observational datasets in assisting domain experts during this exploratory phase. In this work, we introduce Nexus, a system designed to align large repositories of spatio-temporal datasets and identify correlations, facilitating the exploration of causal relationships. Nexus addresses the challenges of aligning tabular datasets across space and time, handling missing data, and identifying correlations deemed "interesting". Empirical evaluation on Chicago Open Data and United Nations datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of Nexus in exposing interesting correlations, many of which have undergone extensive scrutiny by social scientists.