Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Iacovissi, Laura, Lu, Nan, Williamson, Robert C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08643
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866910232718868480
author Iacovissi, Laura
Lu, Nan
Williamson, Robert C.
author_facet Iacovissi, Laura
Lu, Nan
Williamson, Robert C.
contents Corruption is notoriously widespread in data collection. Despite extensive research, the existing literature predominantly focuses on specific settings and learning scenarios, lacking a unified view of corruption modelization and mitigation. In this work, we develop a general theory of corruption, which incorporates all modifications to a supervised learning problem, including changes in model class and loss. Focusing on changes to the underlying probability distributions via Markov kernels, our approach leads to three novel opportunities. First, it enables the construction of a novel, provably exhaustive corruption framework, distinguishing among different corruption types. This serves to unify existing models and establish a consistent nomenclature. Second, it facilitates a systematic analysis of corruption's consequences on learning tasks, by comparing Bayes risks in the clean and corrupted scenarios. Notably, while label corruptions affect only the loss function, attribute corruptions additionally influence the hypothesis class. Third, building upon these results, we investigate mitigations for various corruption types. We expand existing loss-correction methods for label corruption to handle dependent corruption types. Our findings highlight the necessity to generalize this classical corruption-corrected learning framework to a new paradigm with weaker requirements to encompass more corruption types. We provide such a paradigm as well as loss correction formulas in the attribute and joint corruption cases.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_08643
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Corruptions of Supervised Learning Problems: Typology and Mitigations
Iacovissi, Laura
Lu, Nan
Williamson, Robert C.
Machine Learning
Corruption is notoriously widespread in data collection. Despite extensive research, the existing literature predominantly focuses on specific settings and learning scenarios, lacking a unified view of corruption modelization and mitigation. In this work, we develop a general theory of corruption, which incorporates all modifications to a supervised learning problem, including changes in model class and loss. Focusing on changes to the underlying probability distributions via Markov kernels, our approach leads to three novel opportunities. First, it enables the construction of a novel, provably exhaustive corruption framework, distinguishing among different corruption types. This serves to unify existing models and establish a consistent nomenclature. Second, it facilitates a systematic analysis of corruption's consequences on learning tasks, by comparing Bayes risks in the clean and corrupted scenarios. Notably, while label corruptions affect only the loss function, attribute corruptions additionally influence the hypothesis class. Third, building upon these results, we investigate mitigations for various corruption types. We expand existing loss-correction methods for label corruption to handle dependent corruption types. Our findings highlight the necessity to generalize this classical corruption-corrected learning framework to a new paradigm with weaker requirements to encompass more corruption types. We provide such a paradigm as well as loss correction formulas in the attribute and joint corruption cases.
title Corruptions of Supervised Learning Problems: Typology and Mitigations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08643