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arXiv · 1310.5764

Minimax Optimal Convergence Rates for Estimating Ground Truth from Crowdsourced Labels

Chao Gao·Dengyong Zhou
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Abstract

Crowdsourcing has become a primary means for label collection in many real-world machine learning applications. A classical method for inferring the true labels from the noisy labels provided by crowdsourcing workers is Dawid-Skene estimator. In this paper, we prove convergence rates of a projected EM algorithm for the Dawid-Skene estimator. The revealed exponent in the rate of convergence is shown to be optimal via a lower bound argument. Our work resolves the long standing issue of whether Dawid-Skene estimator has sound theoretical guarantees besides its good performance observed in practice. In addition, a comparative study with majority voting illustrates both advantages and pitfalls of the Dawid-Skene estimator.

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Chao Gao, Dengyong Zhou. 2013-10-22. Minimax Optimal Convergence Rates for Estimating Ground Truth from Crowdsourced Labels. https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.5764

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