English

Bayes classifier cannot be learned from noisy responses with unknown noise rates

Machine Learning 2023-04-14 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Training a classifier with noisy labels typically requires the learner to specify the distribution of label noise, which is often unknown in practice. Although there have been some recent attempts to relax that requirement, we show that the Bayes decision rule is unidentified in most classification problems with noisy labels. This suggests it is generally not possible to bypass/relax the requirement. In the special cases in which the Bayes decision rule is identified, we develop a simple algorithm to learn the Bayes decision rule, that does not require knowledge of the noise distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2304.06574,
  title  = {Bayes classifier cannot be learned from noisy responses with unknown noise rates},
  author = {Soham Bakshi and Subha Maity},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.06574},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Invited to present in ICLR Tiny Paper 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:04:45.262Z