Help Me to Help You
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The increasing size of datasets with which researchers in a variety of domains are confronted has led to a range of creative responses, including the deployment of modern machine learning techniques and the advent of large scale “citizen science projects.” However, the ability of the latter to provide suitably large training sets for the former is stretched as the size of the problem (and competition for attention amongst projects) grows. We explore the application of unsupervised learning to leverage structure that exists in an initially unlabelled dataset. We simulate grouping similar points before presenting those groups to volunteers to label. Citizen science labelling of grouped data is more efficient, and the gathered labels can be used to improve efficiency further for labelling future data. To demonstrate these ideas, we perform experiments using data from the Pan-STARRS Survey for Transients (PSST) with volunteer labels gathered by the Zooniverse project, Supernova Hunters and a simulated project using the MNIST handwritten digit dataset. Our results show that, in the best case, we might expect to reduce the required volunteer effort by 87.0% and 92.8% for the two datasets, respectively. These results illustrate a symbiotic relationship between machine learning and citizen scientists where each empowers the other with important implications for the design of citizen science projects in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.482 | 0.435 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".