Robust Deep Ordinal Regression Under Label Noise

Bhanu Garg, Naresh Manwani

Published 2019-12-07Version 1

State-of-the-art ordinal regression methods rely on the correctness of the labels in the data. The real-world data might be susceptible to label noise, and the existing state of the art algorithms do not take label noise into account. So far, none of the approaches for ordinal regression take care of the label noise issue. We propose two novel noise models for ordinal regression. Further, we propose a general framework for robust ordinal regression learning. The proposed method is based on unbiased estimators approach and assumes the knowledge of the noise model. We then give a deep learning implementation for two commonly used loss functions for ordinal regression. We prove that this approach gives a rank consistent model, which is needed for a good ranking rule. We verify the proposed approach empirically and show that it is indeed robust to label noise. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach for learning robust deep ordinal regression models in the presence of label noise.