Null-Labelling: A Generic Approach for Learning in the Presence of Class Noise

Datasets containing class noise present significant challenges to accurate classification, thus requiring classifiers that can refuse to classify noisy instances. We demonstrate the inability of the popular confidence-thresholding rejection method to learn from relationships between input features and not-at-random class noise. To take advantage of these relationships, we propose a novel null-labelling scheme based on iterative re-training with relabelled datasets that uses a classifier to learn to reject instances that are likely to be misclassified. We demonstrate the ability of null-labelling to achieve a significantly better tradeoff between classification error and coverage than the confidence-thresholding method. Models generated by the null-labelling scheme have the added advantage of interpretability, in that they are able to identify features correlated with class noise. We also unify prior theories for combining and evaluating sets of rejecting classifiers.