Regretful Decisions under Label Noise

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Nagaraj, Sujay, Liu, Yang, Calmon, Flavio P., Ustun, Berk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909642244751360
author Nagaraj, Sujay
Liu, Yang
Calmon, Flavio P.
Ustun, Berk
author_facet Nagaraj, Sujay
Liu, Yang
Calmon, Flavio P.
Ustun, Berk
contents Machine learning models are routinely used to support decisions that affect individuals -- be it to screen a patient for a serious illness or to gauge their response to treatment. In these tasks, we are limited to learning models from datasets with noisy labels. In this paper, we study the instance-level impact of learning under label noise. We introduce a notion of regret for this regime, which measures the number of unforeseen mistakes due to noisy labels. We show that standard approaches to learning under label noise can return models that perform well at a population-level while subjecting individuals to a lottery of mistakes. We present a versatile approach to estimate the likelihood of mistakes at the individual-level from a noisy dataset by training models over plausible realizations of datasets without label noise. This is supported by a comprehensive empirical study of label noise in clinical prediction tasks. Our results reveal how failure to anticipate mistakes can compromise model reliability and adoption -- we demonstrate how we can address these challenges by anticipating and avoiding regretful decisions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regretful Decisions under Label Noise
Nagaraj, Sujay
Liu, Yang
Calmon, Flavio P.
Ustun, Berk
Machine Learning
Machine learning models are routinely used to support decisions that affect individuals -- be it to screen a patient for a serious illness or to gauge their response to treatment. In these tasks, we are limited to learning models from datasets with noisy labels. In this paper, we study the instance-level impact of learning under label noise. We introduce a notion of regret for this regime, which measures the number of unforeseen mistakes due to noisy labels. We show that standard approaches to learning under label noise can return models that perform well at a population-level while subjecting individuals to a lottery of mistakes. We present a versatile approach to estimate the likelihood of mistakes at the individual-level from a noisy dataset by training models over plausible realizations of datasets without label noise. This is supported by a comprehensive empirical study of label noise in clinical prediction tasks. Our results reveal how failure to anticipate mistakes can compromise model reliability and adoption -- we demonstrate how we can address these challenges by anticipating and avoiding regretful decisions.
title Regretful Decisions under Label Noise
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09330