Exact Exponent in Optimal Rates for Crowdsourcing
Chao Gao, Yu Lu, Dengyong Zhou · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2016
In many machine learning applications, crowdsourcing has become the primary means for label collection. In this paper, we study the optimal error rate for aggregating labels provided by a set of non-expert workers. Under the classic Dawid-Skene model, we establish matching upper and lower bounds with an exact exponent $mI(π)$ in which $m$ is the number of workers and $I(π)$ the average Chernoff information that characterizes the workers' collective ability. Such an exact characterization of the error exponent allows us to state a precise sample size requirement $m>\frac{1}{I(π)}\log\frac{1}ε$ in order to achieve an $ε$ misclassification error. In addition, our results imply the optimality of various EM algorithms for crowdsourcing initialized by consistent estimators.