How Many Ratings per Item are Necessary for Reliable Significance Testing?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Homan, Christopher, Korn, Flip, Pandita, Deepak, Welty, Chris
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Homan, Christopher
Korn, Flip
Pandita, Deepak
Welty, Chris
author_facet Homan, Christopher
Korn, Flip
Pandita, Deepak
Welty, Chris
contents A cornerstone of machine learning evaluation is the (often hidden) assumption that model and human responses are reliable enough to evaluate models against unitary, authoritative, ``gold standard'' data, via simple metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall. The generative AI revolution would seem to explode this assumption, given the critical role stochastic inference plays. Yet, in spite of public demand for more transparency in AI -- along with strong evidence that humans are unreliable judges -- estimates of model reliability are conventionally based on, at most, a few output responses per input item. We adapt a method, previously used to evaluate the reliability of various metrics and estimators for machine learning evaluation, to determine whether an (existing or planned) dataset has enough responses per item to assure reliable null hypothesis statistical testing. We show that, for many common metrics, collecting even 5-10 responses per item (from each model and team of human evaluators) is not sufficient. We apply our methods to several of the very few extant gold standard test sets with multiple disaggregated responses per item and show that even these datasets lack enough responses per item. We show how our methods can help AI researchers make better decisions about how to collect data for AI evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_02968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Many Ratings per Item are Necessary for Reliable Significance Testing?
Homan, Christopher
Korn, Flip
Pandita, Deepak
Welty, Chris
Machine Learning
I.2.6
A cornerstone of machine learning evaluation is the (often hidden) assumption that model and human responses are reliable enough to evaluate models against unitary, authoritative, ``gold standard'' data, via simple metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall. The generative AI revolution would seem to explode this assumption, given the critical role stochastic inference plays. Yet, in spite of public demand for more transparency in AI -- along with strong evidence that humans are unreliable judges -- estimates of model reliability are conventionally based on, at most, a few output responses per input item. We adapt a method, previously used to evaluate the reliability of various metrics and estimators for machine learning evaluation, to determine whether an (existing or planned) dataset has enough responses per item to assure reliable null hypothesis statistical testing. We show that, for many common metrics, collecting even 5-10 responses per item (from each model and team of human evaluators) is not sufficient. We apply our methods to several of the very few extant gold standard test sets with multiple disaggregated responses per item and show that even these datasets lack enough responses per item. We show how our methods can help AI researchers make better decisions about how to collect data for AI evaluation.
title How Many Ratings per Item are Necessary for Reliable Significance Testing?
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02968