Optimal Crowd-Powered Rating and Filtering Algorithms

Proceedings Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 7(9):685-696, May 2014.

• Manuscript

We focus on crowd-powered filtering, i.e., filtering a large set of items using humans. Filtering is one of the most commonly used building blocks in crowdsourcing applications and systems. While solutions for crowd-powered filtering exist, they make a range of implicit assumptions and restrictions, ultimately rendering them not powerful enough for real-world applications. We describe two approaches to discard these implicit assumptions and restrictions: one, that carefully generalizes prior work, leading to an optimal, but often-times intractable solution, and another, that provides a novel way of reasoning about filtering strategies, leading to a sometimes sub-optimal, but efficiently computable solution (that is provably close to optimal). We demonstrate that our techniques lead to significant reductions in error of up to 30-40% for fixed cost over prior work in a novel crowdsourcing application: peer evaluation in online courses.