Towards Automatically Inferring Constraints to Identify Implicit Assumptions in Data Analysis

2026-07-03

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of irreproducibility in data analysis scripts, which often stems from implicit assumptions—such as specific package versions, expected data formats, or undocumented manual interventions. The paper proposes a static analysis approach tailored to data analysis workflows that, for the first time, unifies diverse implicit assumptions into inferable constraint models. By leveraging customized program analysis and example-driven modeling, the authors develop a prototype system capable of automatically identifying these hidden assumptions, extracting executable preconditions, and generating verifiable constraints. The resulting framework supports runtime validation and automatic documentation generation, substantially enhancing script executability, reproducibility, and interpretability.

Abstract

High-level languages such as R or Python are used frequently to analyze and visualize data in the form of scripts or notebooks. However, these artifacts suffer from reproducibility issues due to what we frame as implicit assumptions made by the authors. Such assumptions range from package versions and shapes of involved data tables, to manual and often undocumented setup steps. Within this work, we provide a unified, example-driven perspective on implicit assumptions in data analysis backed by an explorative proof-of-concept implementation. With this perspective, we propose the use of static analysis techniques to identify such assumptions and to make them explicit in the form of code constraints, focusing on the inclusion of data-analysis-specific issues. Such constraints can then be used to automatically transform these scripts into executable and reproducible artifacts, to check these assumptions at runtime, and to serve as documentation to support code reuse and comprehension.

Problem

• implicit assumptions
• reproducibility
• data analysis
• static analysis
• code constraints

Innovation

• implicit assumptions
• static analysis
• code constraints
• reproducibility
• data analysis