GIDCL: A Graph-Enhanced Interpretable Data Cleaning Framework with Large Language Models

Data quality is critical across many applications. The utility of data is undermined by various errors, making rigorous data cleaning a necessity. Traditional data cleaning systems depend heavily on predefined rules and constraints, which necessitate significant domain knowledge and manual effort. Moreover, while configuration-free approaches and deep learning methods have been explored, they struggle with complex error patterns, lacking interpretability, requiring extensive feature engineering or labeled data. This paper introduces GIDCL ( G raph-enhanced I nterpretable D ata C leaning with L arge language models), a pioneering framework that harnesses the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) alongside Graph Neural Network (GNN) to address the challenges of traditional and machine learning-based data cleaning methods. By converting relational tables into graph structures, GIDCL utilizes GNN to effectively capture and leverage structural correlations among data, enhancing the model's ability to understand and rectify complex dependencies and errors. The framework's creator-critic workflow innovatively employs LLMs to automatically generate interpretable data cleaning rules and tailor feature engineering with minimal labeled data. This process includes the iterative refinement of error detection and correction models through few-shot learning, significantly reducing the need for extensive manual configuration. GIDCL not only improves the precision and efficiency of data cleaning but also enhances its interpretability, making it accessible and practical for non-expert users. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that GIDCL significantly outperforms existing methods, improving F1-scores by 10% on average while requiring only 20 labeled tuples.