Forest vs Tree: The $(N, K)$ Trade-off in Reproducible ML Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the optimal balance between the number of items and responses per item in ML evaluation, emphasizing the importance of accounting for human disagreement within budget constraints to improve reliability.

Contribution

It introduces a method to determine the optimal $(N, K)$ configuration for evaluation data collection, considering human disagreement and different metrics, to maximize reliability within a fixed budget.

Findings

Optimal $(N, K)$ often occurs with $K > 10$.

Budget of $N imes K$ typically should not exceed 1000.

Metrics sensitive to response distribution perform better at higher $K$.

Abstract

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific validation and of the authority it confers on its results. Reproducibility in machine learning evaluations leads to greater trust, confidence, and value. However, the ground truth responses used in machine learning often necessarily come from humans, among whom disagreement is prevalent, and surprisingly little research has studied the impact of effectively ignoring disagreement in these responses, as is typically the case. One reason for the lack of research is that budgets for collecting human-annotated evaluation data are limited, and obtaining more samples from multiple raters for each example greatly increases the per-item annotation costs. We investigate the trade-off between the number of items ($N$) and the number of responses per item ($K$) needed for reliable machine learning evaluation. We analyze a diverse collection of categorical datasets for which multiple annotations per item exist, and simulated distributions fit to these datasets, to determine the optimal $(N, K)$ configuration, given a fixed budget ($N \times K$), for collecting evaluation data and reliably comparing the performance of machine learning models. Our findings show, first, that accounting for human disagreement may come with $N \times K$ at no more than 1000 (and often much lower) for every dataset tested on at least one metric. Moreover, this minimal $N \times K$ almost always occurred for $K > 10$. Furthermore, the nature of the tradeoff between $K$ and $N$, or if one even existed, depends on the evaluation metric, with metrics that are more sensitive to the full distribution of responses performing better at higher levels of $K$. Our methods can be used to help ML practitioners get more effective test data by finding the optimal metrics and number of items and annotations per item to collect to get the most reliability for their budget.