In this paper, we study the accuracy of values aggregated over classes predicted by a classification algorithm. The problem is that the resulting aggregates (e.g., sums of a variable) are known to be biased. The bias can be large even for highly accurate classification algorithms, in particular when dealing with class-imbalanced data. To correct this bias, the algorithm's classification error rates have to be estimated. In this estimation, two issues arise when applying existing bias correction methods. First, inaccuracies in estimating classification error rates have to be taken into account. Second, impermissible estimates, such as a negative estimate for a positive value, have to be dismissed. We show that both issues are relevant in applications where the true labels are known only for a small set of data points. We propose a novel bias correction method using Bayesian inference. The novelty of our method is that it imposes constraints on the model parameters. We show that our method solves the problem of biased classification-based aggregates as well as the two issues above, in the general setting of multi-class classification. In the empirical evaluation, using a binary classifier on a real-world dataset of company tax returns, we show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of mean squared error.
To the best of our knowledge, @cite_14 is the first work describing the classification error model and studying classification-based aggregates. We mention front runners from two fields using similar bias correction methods.
@cite_14
2048316909 2110840966 1550206324 2141649520
Cumulative citation recommendation refers to the task of filtering a time-ordered corpus for documents that are highly relevant to a predefined set of entities. This task has been introduced at the TREC Knowledge Base Acceleration track in 2012, where two main families of approaches emerged: classification and ranking. In this paper we perform an experimental comparison of these two strategies using supervised learning with a rich feature set. Our main finding is that ranking outperforms classification on all evaluation settings and metrics. Our analysis also reveals that a ranking-based approach has more potential for future improvements. This paper presents a new method for linearly combining multiple neural network classifiers based on the statistical pattern recognition theory. In our approach, several neural networks are first selected based on which works best for each class in terms of minimizing classification errors. Then, they are linearly combined to form an ideal classifier that exploits the strengths of the individual classifiers. In this approach, the minimum classification error criterion is utilized to estimate the optimal linear weights. In this formulation, because the classification decision rule is incorporated into the cost function, a more suitable better combination of weights for the classification objective could be obtained. Experimental results using artificial and real data sets show that the proposed method can construct a better combined classifier that outperforms the best single classifier in terms of overall classification errors for test data. Recent work in text classification has used two different first-order probabilistic models for classification, both of which make the naive Bayes assumption. Some use a multi-variate Bernoulli model, that is, a Bayesian Network with no dependencies between words and binary word features (e.g. Larkey and Croft 1996; Koller and Sahami 1997). Others use a multinomial model, that is, a uni-gram language model with integer word counts (e.g. Lewis and Gale 1994; Mitchell 1997). This paper aims to clarify the confusion by describing the differences and details of these two models, and by empirically comparing their classification performance on five text corpora. We find that the multi-variate Bernoulli performs well with small vocabulary sizes, but that the multinomial performs usually performs even better at larger vocabulary sizes--providing on average a 27 reduction in error over the multi-variate Bernoulli model at any vocabulary size. This paper addresses the problem of extracting accurate labels from crowdsourced datasets, a key challenge in crowdsourcing. Prior work has focused on modeling the reliability of individual workers, for instance, by way of confusion matrices, and using these latent traits to estimate the true labels more accurately. However, this strategy becomes ineffective when there are too few labels per worker to reliably estimate their quality. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel community-based Bayesian label aggregation model, CommunityBCC, which assumes that crowd workers conform to a few different types, where each type represents a group of workers with similar confusion matrices. We assume that each worker belongs to a certain community, where the worker's confusion matrix is similar to (a perturbation of) the community's confusion matrix. Our model can then learn a set of key latent features: (i) the confusion matrix of each community, (ii) the community membership of each user, and (iii) the aggregated label of each item. We compare the performance of our model against established aggregation methods on a number of large-scale, real-world crowdsourcing datasets. Our experimental results show that our CommunityBCC model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art label aggregation methods, requiring, on average, 50 less data to pass the 90 accuracy mark.