Enhanced label noise filtering with multiple voting

Abstract

Label noises exist in many applications, and their presence can degrade learning performance. Researchers usually use filters to identify and eliminate them prior to training. The ensemble learning based filter (EnFilter) is the most widely used filter. According to the voting mechanism, EnFilter is mainly divided into two types: single-voting based (SVFilter) and multiple-voting based (MVFilter). In general, MVFilter is more often preferred because multiple-voting could address the intrinsic limitations of single-voting. However, the most important unsolved issue in MVFilter is how to determine the optimal decision point (ODP). Conceptually, the decision point is a threshold value, which determines the noise detection performance. To maximize the performance of MVFilter, we propose a novel approach to compute the optimal decision point. Our approach is data driven and cost sensitive, which determines the ODP based on the given noisy training dataset and noise misrecognition cost matrix. The core idea of our approach is to estimate the mislabeled data probability distributions, based on which the expected cost of each possible decision point could be inferred. Experimental results on a set of benchmark datasets illustrate the utility of our proposed approach.