Data quality in crowdsourcing and spamming behavior detection.
Journal:
Behavior research methods
Published Date:
Aug 8, 2025
Abstract
As crowdsourcing emerges as an efficient and cost-effective method for obtaining labels for machine learning datasets, it is important to assess the quality of crowd-provided data to improve analysis performance and reduce biases in subsequent machine learning tasks. Given the lack of ground truth in most cases of crowdsourcing, we refer to data quality as the annotators' consistency and credibility. Unlike the simple scenarios where kappa coefficient and intraclass correlation coefficient usually can apply, online crowdsourcing requires dealing with more complex situations. We introduce a systematic method for evaluating data quality and detecting spamming threats via variance decomposition, and we classify spammers into three categories based on their different behavioral patterns. A spammer index is proposed to assess entire data consistency, and two metrics are developed to measure crowd workers' credibility by utilizing the Markov chain and generalized random effects models. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practicality of our techniques and their advantages by applying them to a face verification task using both simulated and real-world data collected from two crowdsourcing platforms.
