Identifying Mislabeled Training Data
  This paper presents a new approach to identifying and eliminating mislabeled
training instances for supervised learning. The goal of this approach is to
improve classification accuracies produced by learning algorithms by improving
the quality of the training data. Our approach uses a set of learning
algorithms to create classifiers that serve as noise filters for the training
data. We evaluate single algorithm, majority vote and consensus filters on five
datasets that are prone to labeling errors. Our experiments illustrate that
filtering significantly improves classification accuracy for noise levels up to
30 percent. An analytical and empirical evaluation of the precision of our
approach shows that consensus filters are conservative at throwing away good
data at the expense of retaining bad data and that majority filters are better
at detecting bad data at the expense of throwing away good data. This suggests
that for situations in which there is a paucity of data, consensus filters are
preferable, whereas majority vote filters are preferable for situations with an
abundance of data.
