Impact of biased mislabeling on learning with deep networks

The aim of machine learning is to obtain a good model to correctly predict unseen data. In order to train such models, one needs a sufficient number of clean examples of the ground truth. However, some applications' datasets are not guaranteed to consist entirely of pure examples and might contain mislabeled data. Handling mislabeled data is a domain of outlier statistics and have been studied to some extent in the context of machine learning. Here we ask how does mislabeled data in a training set effect classification performance in deep neural networks. More specifically, motivated by an industrial application, we consider the case where the probability of the class mislabeling in the training set varies considerably between each class. We hence contrast in this paper the case of systematic mislabeling of one class to the more commonly studied situation of a uniform mislabeling between all classes. We demonstrate that the non-uniform mislabeling is more challenging than the more commonly studied uniform case. We also explicitly explore the dependence of our findings to the size of the training data which is not only a common limiting factor in industrial applications but which also has a large effect on the results. We demonstrate that deep networks have an inherent robustness when large datasets are available.