English

Cheaper and Better: Selecting Good Workers for Crowdsourcing

Machine Learning 2015-02-04 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Applications

Abstract

Crowdsourcing provides a popular paradigm for data collection at scale. We study the problem of selecting subsets of workers from a given worker pool to maximize the accuracy under a budget constraint. One natural question is whether we should hire as many workers as the budget allows, or restrict on a small number of top-quality workers. By theoretically analyzing the error rate of a typical setting in crowdsourcing, we frame the worker selection problem into a combinatorial optimization problem and propose an algorithm to solve it efficiently. Empirical results on both simulated and real-world datasets show that our algorithm is able to select a small number of high-quality workers, and performs as good as, sometimes even better than, the much larger crowds as the budget allows.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.00725,
  title  = {Cheaper and Better: Selecting Good Workers for Crowdsourcing},
  author = {Hongwei Li and Qiang Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.00725},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:20:00.731Z