CrowdFusion: A Crowdsourced Approach on Data Fusion Refinement

Data fusion has played an important role in data mining because high-quality data is required in a lot of applications. As on-line data may be out-of-date and errors in the data may propagate with copying and referring between sources, it is hard to achieve satisfying results with merely applying existing data fusion methods to fuse Web data. In this paper, we make use of the crowd to achieve high-quality data fusion result. We design a framework selecting a set of tasks to ask crowds in order to improve the confidence of data. Since data are correlated and crowds may provide incorrect answers, how to select a proper set of tasks to ask the crowd is a very challenging problem. In this paper, we design an approximation solution to address this challenge since we prove that the problem is at NP-hard. To further improve the efficiency, we design a pruning strategy and a preprocessing method, which effectively improve the performance of the proposed approximation solution. Furthermore, we find that under certain scenarios, we are not interested in all the facts, but only a specific set of facts. Thus, for these specific scenarios, we also develop another approximation solution which is much faster than the general approximation solution. We verify the solutions with extensive experiments on a real crowdsourcing platform.