Visible to the public Multi-source Hierarchical Prediction Consolidation

TitleMulti-source Hierarchical Prediction Consolidation
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsZhang, Chenwei, Xie, Sihong, Li, Yaliang, Gao, Jing, Fan, Wei, Yu, Philip S.
Conference NameProceedings of the 25th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-4073-1
Keywordscrowdsourcing, Ensemble, expert systems, Hierarchy, Human Behavior, human factors, privacy, pubcrawl, Scalability, unsupervised learning
AbstractIn big data applications such as healthcare data mining, due to privacy concerns, it is necessary to collect predictions from multiple information sources for the same instance, with raw features being discarded or withheld when aggregating multiple predictions. Besides, crowd-sourced labels need to be aggregated to estimate the ground truth of the data. Due to the imperfection caused by predictive models or human crowdsourcing workers, noisy and conflicting information is ubiquitous and inevitable. Although state-of-the-art aggregation methods have been proposed to handle label spaces with flat structures, as the label space is becoming more and more complicated, aggregation under a label hierarchical structure becomes necessary but has been largely ignored. These label hierarchies can be quite informative as they are usually created by domain experts to make sense of highly complex label correlations such as protein functionality interactions or disease relationships. We propose a novel multi-source hierarchical prediction consolidation method to effectively exploits the complicated hierarchical label structures to resolve the noisy and conflicting information that inherently originates from multiple imperfect sources. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. The consolidation result is inferred in a totally unsupervised, iterative fashion. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed method over existing alternatives.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2983323.2983676
DOI10.1145/2983323.2983676
Citation Keyzhang_multi-source_2016