CleanML: A Benchmark for Joint Data Cleaning and Machine Learning

It is widely recognized that the data quality affects machine learning (ML) model performances, and data scientists spend considerable amount of time on data cleaning before model training. However, to date, there does not exist a rigorous study on how exactly does cleaning affect ML --- ML community usually focuses on the effects of specific types of noises of certain distributions (e.g., mislabels) on certain ML models, while database (DB) community has been mostly studying the problem of data cleaning alone without considering how data is consumed by downstream analytics. We propose the CleanML benchmark that systematically investigates the impact of data cleaning on downstream ML models. The CleanML benchmark currently includes 13 real-world datasets with real errors, five common error types, and seven different ML models. To ensure that our findings are statistically significant, CleanML carefully controls the randomness in ML experiments using statistical hypothesis testing, and also uses the Benjamini-Yekutieli (BY) procedure to control potential false discoveries due to many hypotheses in the benchmark. We obtain many interesting and non-trivial insights, and identify multiple open research directions. We also release the benchmark and hope to invite future studies on the important problems of joint data cleaning and ML.

Hierarchical RNN for Information Extraction from Lawsuit Documents

Every lawsuit document contains the information about the party's claim, court's analysis, decision and others, and all of this information are helpful to understand the case better and predict the judge's decision on similar case in the future. However, the extraction of these information from the document is difficult because the language is too complicated and sentences varied at length. We treat this problem as a task of sequence labeling, and this paper presents the first research to extract relevant information from the civil lawsuit document in China with the hierarchical RNN framework.