Automating Data Quality Monitoring with Reference Data Profiles

Data quality is of central importance for the qualitative evaluation of decisions taken by AI-based applications. In practice, data from several heterogeneous data sources is integrated, but complete, global domain knowledge is often not available. In such heterogeneous scenarios, it is particularly difficult to monitor data quality (e.g., completeness, accuracy, timeliness) over time. In this paper, we formally introduce a new data-centric method for automated data quality monitoring, which is based on reference data profiles. A reference data profile is a set of data profiling statistics that is learned automatically to model the target quality of the data. In contrast to most existing data quality approaches that require domain experts to define rules, our method can be fully automated from initialization to continuous monitoring. This data-centric method has been implemented in our data quality tool DQ-MeeRKat and evaluated with six real-world telematic device data streams.