Targeted feedback collection applied to multi-criteria source Selection

A multi-criteria source selection (MCSS) scenario identifies, from a set of candidate data sources, the subset that best meets a user’s needs. These needs are expressed using several criteria, which are used to evaluate the candidate data sources. A MCSS problem can be solved using multi-dimensional optimisation techniques that trade-off the different objectives. Sometimes we may have uncertain knowledge regarding how well the candidate data sources meet the criteria. In order to overcome this uncertainty, we may rely on end users or crowds to annotate the data items produced by the sources in relation to the selection criteria. In this paper, we introduce an approach called Targeted Feedback Collection (TFC), which aims to identify those data items on which feedback should be collected, thereby providing evidence on how the sources satisfy the required criteria. TFC targets feedback by considering the confidence intervals around the estimated criteria values. The TFC strategy has been evaluated, with promising results, against other approaches to feedback collection, including active learning, using real-world data sets.