A Minimax Optimal Algorithm for Crowdsourcing

When

29/06/2016    
2:00 pm-3:00 pm
Richard Combes
Centrale-Supelec

Where

LINCS Meeting Room 40
23, avenue d'Italie, Paris, 75013

Event Type

We consider the problem of accurately estimating the reliability of workers based on noisy labels they provide, which is a fundamental question in crowdsourcing. We propose a novel lower bound on the minimax estimation error which applies to any estimation procedure. We further propose Triangular Estimation (TE), an algorithm for estimating the reliability of workers. TE has low complexity, may be implemented in a streaming setting when labels are provided by workers in real time, and does not rely on an iterative procedure. We further prove that TE is minimax optimal and matches our lower bound. We conclude by assessing the performance of TE and other state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world data sets.Joint work with Thomas Bonald (Telecom ParisTech)