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(English) In: Journal of Data-centric Machine Learning Research (DMLR)Article in journal (Refereed) Submitted
Abstract [en] Data accuracy is crucial for reliable research, accurate decision-making, and high-performance machine learning.However, maintaining and improving data accuracy, especially at scale, is challenging and difficult to verify. By combining statistical quality control and branching process theory, we formalize an iterative data curation framework that scales well to large data sets. The framework is agnostic to the source and reliability of proposed data edits, allowing human annotators, automated rules, machine learning models, large language models, and external data sources to be combined within a common statistical process. We prove that under mild assumptions, the proposed iterative approach asymptotically eliminates all errors with probability one for both tabular and textual data.Additionally, we provide guarantees that data accuracy testing further accelerates error reduction. We corroborate these results through simulations on text and tabular data, as well as a real-world application, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness in improving the accuracy of data at scale.
Keywords data accuracy, iterative data curation, data quality, statistical quality assurance
National Category
Probability Theory and Statistics
Research subject
Statistics
Identifiers urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-596089 (URN)
2026-08-202026-08-202026-08-27