Abstract

While crowdsourcing has been a cost and time efficient method to label massive samples, one critical issue is quality control, for which the k challenge is to infer the ground truth from noisy or even adversarial data by various users. A large class of crowdsourcing problems, such as those involving age, grade, level, or stage, have an ordinal structure in their labels. Based on a technique of sampling estimated label from the posterior distribution, we define a novel separating width among the labeled observations to characterize the quality of sampled labels, and develop an efficient algorithm to optimize it through solv ing multiple linear decision boundaries and adjusting prior distributions. Our algorithm is empirically evaluated on several real world datasets and demonstrates its supremacy over state-ofthe-art methods.