An Adaptive Method for Weak Supervision with Drifting Data
Alessio Mazzetto Reza Esfandiarpoor Eli Upfal Stephen H. Bach
We introduce an adaptive method with formal quality guarantees for weak
supervision in a non-stationary setting. Our goal is to infer the unknown
labels of a sequence of data by using weak supervision sources that provide
independent noisy signals of the correct classification for each data point.
This setting includes crowdsourcing and programmatic weak supervision. We focus
on the non-stationary case, where the accuracy of the weak supervision sources
can drift over time, e.g., because of changes in the underlying data
distribution. Due to the drift, older data could provide misleading information
to infer the label of the current data point. Previous work relied on a priori
assumptions on the magnitude of the drift to decide how much data to use from
the past. Comparatively, our algorithm does not require any assumptions on the
drift, and it adapts based on the input. In particular, at each step, our
algorithm guarantees an estimation of the current accuracies of the weak
supervision sources over a window of past observations that minimizes a
trade-off between the error due to the variance of the estimation and the error
due to the drift. Experiments on synthetic and real-world labelers show that
our approach indeed adapts to the drift. Unlike fixed-window-size strategies,
it dynamically chooses a window size that allows it to consistently maintain
good performance.