DataDiff: User-Interpretable Data Transformation Summaries for Collaborative Data Analysis

Interest in collaborative dataset versioning has emerged due to complex, ad-hoc, and collaborative nature of data science, and the need to record and reason about data at various stages of pre-processing, cleaning, and analysis. To support effective collaborative dataset versioning, one critical operation is differentiation : to succinctly describe what has changed from one dataset to the next. Differentiation, or diffing, allows users to understand changes between two versions, to better understand the evolution process, or to support effective merging or conflict detection across versions. We demonstrate DataDiff, a practical and concise data-diff tool that provides human-interpretable explanations of changes between datasets without reliance on the operations that led to the changes.