Learning SVMs from sloppily labeled data

Abstract

This paper proposes a modelling of Support Vector Machine (SVM) learning to address the problem of learning with sloppy labels. In binary classification, learning with sloppy labels is the situation where a learner is provided with labelled data, where the observed labels of each class are possibly noisy (flipped) version of their true class and where the probability of flipping a label y to -y only depends on y. The noise probability is therefore constant and uniform within each class: learning with positive and unlabeled data is for instance a motivating example for this model. In order to learn with sloppy labels, we propose SloppySvm, an SVM algorithm that minimizes a tailored nonconvex functional that is shown to be a uniform estimate of the noise-free SVM functional. Several experiments validate the soundness of our approach. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.