Title
Budget-optimal crowdsourcing using low-rank matrix approximations
Abstract
Crowdsourcing systems, in which numerous tasks are electronically distributed to numerous "information piece- workers", have emerged as an effective paradigm for human- powered solving of large scale problems in domains such as image classification, data entry, optical character recognition, recommendation, and proofreading. Because these low-paid workers can be unreliable, nearly all crowdsourcers must devise schemes to increase confidence in their answers, typically by assigning each task multiple times and combining the answers in some way such as majority voting. In this paper, we consider a model of such crowdsourcing tasks and pose the problem of minimizing the total price (i.e., number of task assignments) that must be paid to achieve a target overall reliability. We give a new algorithm for deciding which tasks to assign to which workers and for inferring correct answers from the workers' answers. We show that our algorithm, based on low-rank matrix approximation, significantly outperforms majority voting and, in fact, is order-optimal through comparison to an oracle that knows the reliability of every worker.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/Allerton.2011.6120180
Communication, Control, and Computing
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
approximation theory,cost reduction,matrix algebra,minimisation,outsourcing,personnel,pricing,problem solving,reliability,budget-optimal crowdsourcing,human-powered problem solving,information pieceworkers,low-paid workers,low-rank matrix approximation,reliability,total price minimization
Conference
978-1-4577-1817-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
28
1.48
0
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David R. Karger1193672233.64
Sewoong Oh284360.50
Devavrat Shah34075340.63