Crowdsourcing for machine learning in public health surveillance: lessons learned from Amazon Mechanical Turk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Crowdsourcing services such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) allow researchers to use the collective intelligence of a wide range of online users for labour-intensive tasks. Since the manual verification of the quality of the collected results is difficult due to the large volume of data and the quick turnaround time of the process, many questions remain to be explored regarding the reliability of these resources for developing digital public health systems.Objective: The main objective of this study is to explore and evaluate the application of crowdsourcing, in general, and AMT, in specific, for developing digital public health surveillance systems.Methods: We collected 296,166 crowd-generated labels for 98,722 tweets, labelled by 610 AMT workers, to develop machine learning (ML) models for detecting behaviours related to physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep quality (PASS) among Twitter users. To infer the ground truth labels and explore the quality of these labels, we studied four statistical consensus methods that are agnostic of task features and only focus on worker labelling behaviour. Moreover, to model the meta-information associated with each labelling task and leverage the potentials of context-sensitive data in the truth inference process, we developed seven ML models, including traditional classifiers (offline and active), a deep-learning-based classification model, and a hybrid convolutional neural network (CNN) model.Results: While most of the crowdsourcing-based studies in public health have often equated majority vote with quality, the results of our study using a truth set of 9,000 manually labelled tweets show that consensus-based inference models mask underlying uncertainty in the data and overlook the importance of task meta-information. Our evaluations across three PASS datasets show that truth inference is a context-sensitive process, and none of the studied methods in this paper was consistently superior to others in predicting the truth label. We also found that the performance of the ML models trained on crowd-labelled data is sensitive to the quality of these labels, and poor-quality labels lead to incorrect assessment of these models. Finally, we provide a set of practical recommendations to improve the quality and reliability of crowdsourced data.Conclusion: Findings indicate the importance of the quality of crowd-generated labels in developing machine learning models designed for decision-making purposes, such as public health surveillance decisions. A combination of inference models outlined and analyzed in this work could be used to quantitatively measure and improve the quality of crowd-generated labels for training ML models.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".