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Learning from crowds is a classification problem where the provided training instances are labeled by multiple (usually conflicting) annotators. In different scenarios of this problem, straightforward strategies show an astonishing performance. In this paper, we characterize the crowd scenarios where these basic strategies show a good behavior. As a consequence, this study allows to identify those scenarios where non‐basic methods for combining the multiple labels are expected to obtain better results. In this context, we extend the learning from crowds paradigm to the multidimensional (MD) classification domain. Measuring the quality of the annotators, the presented EM‐based method overcomes the lack of a fully reliable labeling for learning MD Bayesian network classifiers: As the expertise is identified and the contribution of the relevant annotators promoted, the model parameters are optimized. The good performance of our proposal is demonstrated throughout different sets of experiments.

Machine learning techniques have been previously used to assist clinicians to select embryos for human assisted reproduction. This work aims to show how an appropriate modeling of the problem can contribute to improve machine learning techniques for embryo selection. In this study, a dataset of 330 consecutive cycles (and associated embryos) carried out by the Unit of Assisted Reproduction of the Hospital Donostia (Spain) throughout 18 months has been analyzed. The problem of the embryo selection has been modeled by a novel weakly supervised paradigm, learning from label proportions, which considers all the available data, including embryos whose fate cannot be certainly established. Furthermore, all the collected features, describing cycles and embryos, have been considered in a multi-variate data analysis. Our integral solution has been successfully tested. Experimental results show that the proposed technique consistently outperforms an equivalent approach based on standard supervised classification. Embryos in this study were selected for transference according to the criteria of the Spanish Association for Reproduction Biology Studies. Obtained classification models outperform this criteria, specifically reordering medium-quality embryos.Assisted reproductive technologies, Embryo selection, Machine learning, Learning from label proportions, Bayesian network models

Over the last decade, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have contributed to science by collecting or analyzing data. This public participation in science, also known as citizen science, has contributed to significant discoveries and led to publications in major scientific journals. However, little attention has been paid to data quality issues. In this work we argue that being able to determine the accuracy of data obtained by crowdsourcing is a fundamental question and we point out that, for many real-life scenarios, mathematical tools and processes for the evaluation of data quality are missing. We propose a probabilistic methodology for the evaluation of the accuracy of labeling data obtained by crowdsourcing in citizen science. The methodology builds on an abstract probabilistic graphical model formalism, which is shown to generalize some already existing label aggregation models. We show how to make practical use of the methodology through a comparison of data obtained from different citizen science communities analyzing the earthquake that took place in Albania in 2019.

In software engineering, associating each reported defect with a category allows, among many other things, for the appropriate allocation of resources. Although this classification task can be automated using standard machine learning techniques, the categorization of defects for model training requires expert knowledge, which is not always available. To circumvent this dependency, we propose to apply the learning from crowds paradigm, where training categories are obtained from multiple non-expert annotators (and so may be incomplete, noisy or erroneous) and, dealing with this subjective class information, classifiers are efficiently learnt. To illustrate our proposal, we present two real applications of the IBM's orthogonal defect classification working on the issue tracking systems from two different real domains. Bayesian network classifiers learnt using two state-of-the-art methodologies from data labeled by a crowd of annotators are used to predict the category (impact) of reported software defects. The considered methodologies show enhanced performance regarding the straightforward solution (majority voting) according to different metrics. This shows the possibilities of using non-expert knowledge aggregation techniques when expert knowledge is unavailable.

Majority voting is a popular and robust strategy to aggregate different opinions in learning from crowds, where each worker labels examples according to their own criteria. Although it has been extensively studied in the binary case, its behavior with multiple classes is not completely clear, specifically when annotations are biased. This paper attempts to fill that gap. The behavior of the majority voting strategy is studied in-depth in multi-class domains, emphasizing the effect of annotation bias. By means of a complete experimental setting, we show the limitations of the standard majority voting strategy. The use of three simple techniques that infer global information from the annotations and annotators allows us to put the performance of the majority voting strategy in context.

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