Reliable classification by unreliable crowds

We consider the use of error-control codes and decoding algorithms to perform reliable classification using unreliable and anonymous human crowd workers by adapting coding-theoretic techniques for the specific crowdsourcing application. We develop an ordering principle for the quality of crowds and describe how system perfor-mance changes with the quality of the crowd. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed coding scheme using both simulated data and real datasets from Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowd-sourcing microtask platform. Results suggest that good codes may improve the performance of the crowdsourcing task over typical majority-vote approaches. Index Terms — crowdsourcing, classification, error-control code