Iterative Data Curation with Theoretical Guarantees

Abstract: In recent years, more and more large data sets have become available. Data accuracy, the absence of verifiable errors in data, is crucial for these large materials to enable high-quality research, downstream applications, and model training. This results in the problem of how to curate or improve data accuracy in such large and growing data, especially when the data is too large for manual curation to be feasible. This paper presents a unified procedure for iterative and continuous improvement of data sets. We provide theoretical guarantees that data accuracy tests speed up error reduction and, most importantly, that the proposed approach will, asymptotically, eliminate all errors in data with probability one. We corroborate the theoretical results with simulations and a real-world use case.