Generalisations of stochastic supervision models

Abstract When the labelling information is not deterministic, traditional supervised learning algorithms cannot be applied. In this case, stochastic supervision models provide a valuable alternative to classification. However, these models are restricted in several aspects, which critically limits their applicability. In this paper, we provide four generalisations of stochastic supervision models, extending them to asymmetric assessments, multiple classes, feature-dependent assessments and multi-modal classes, respectively. Corresponding to these generalisations, we derive four new EM algorithms. We show the effectiveness of our generalisations through illustrative examples of simulated datasets, as well as real-world examples of three famous datasets, the MNIST dataset, the CIFAR-10 dataset and the EMNIST dataset.