Count Estimation With a Low-Accuracy Machine Learning Model

Abstract

Many Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems use machine learning techniques, such as deep neural networks. IoT systems can predict attributes, such as age, sex, car speed, human walking speed, and types of animals, using machine learning techniques. Although the functionality of machine learning is undeniable, the prediction accuracy is not always high. When a machine learning model is used to recognize several objects in an object counting system, the estimated count will have a significant error because of the accumulation of the recognition error of each object. In this study, a count estimation method that uses a confusion matrix generated in the training phase was proposed. The proposed method consists of an iterative Bayesian technique with the confusion matrix for count estimation and mitigating over-iterations technique for reducing estimated errors. The proposed method can be used even for a low-accuracy machine learning model. Experiments with synthetic and real data sets were conducted to demonstrate the functionality of the proposed method. The estimation errors of the proposed method were reduced by 64.3% in average compared to the baseline method in the experiments.