Mitigating Class Boundary Label Uncertainty to Reduce Both Model Bias and Variance

Abstract

The study of model bias and variance with respect to decision boundaries is critically important in supervised classification. There is generally a tradeoff between the two, as fine-tuning of the decision boundary of a classification model to accommodate more boundary training samples (i.e., higher model complexity) may improve training accuracy (i.e., lower bias) but hurt generalization against unseen data (i.e., higher variance). By focusing on just classification boundary fine-tuning and model complexity, it is difficult to reduce both bias and variance. To overcome this dilemma, we take a different perspective and investigate a new approach to handle inaccuracy and uncertainty in the training data labels, which are inevitable in many applications where labels are conceptual and labeling is performed by human annotators. The process of classification can be undermined by uncertainty in the labels of the training data; extending a boundary to accommodate an inaccurately labeled point will increase both bias and variance. Our novel method can reduce both bias and variance by estimating the pointwise label uncertainty of the training set and accordingly adjusting the training sample weights such that those samples with high uncertainty are weighted down and those with low uncertainty are weighted up. In this way, uncertain samples have a smaller contribution to the objective function of the model's learning algorithm and exert less pull on the decision boundary. In a real-world physical activity recognition case study, the data presents many labeling challenges, and we show that this new approach improves model performance and reduces model variance.