Abstract
With the increasing popularity of crowdsourcing and crowd computing, the question of how to select a well-performing crowd process for a problem at hand is growing ever more important. Prior work casted crowd process selection to an optimization problem, whose solution is the crowd process performing best for a user’s problem. However, existing approaches require users to probabilistically model aspects of the problem, which may entail a substantial investment of time and may be error-prone. We propose to use black- box optimization instead, a family of techniques that do not require probabilistic modelling by the end user. Specifically, we adopt Bayesian Optimization to approximate the maximum of a utility function quantifying the user’s (business-) objectives while minimizing search cost. Our approach is validated in a simulation and three real-world experiments.
The black-box nature of our approach may enable us to reduce the entry barrier for efficiently building crowdsourcing solutions.
De Boer, Patrick M