classification

cleanlab can be used for learning with noisy labels for any dataset and model.

For regular (multi-class) classification tasks, the CleanLearning class wraps an instance of an sklearn classifier. The wrapped classifier must adhere to the sklearn estimator API, meaning it must define four functions:

• clf.fit(X, y, sample_weight=None)

• clf.predict_proba(X)

• clf.predict(X)

• clf.score(X, y, sample_weight=None)

where X contains data (i.e. features), y contains labels (with elements in 0, 1, …, K-1, where K is the number of classes). The first index of X and of y should correspond to the different examples in the dataset, such that len(X) = len(y) = N (sample-size). Here sample_weight re-weights examples in the loss function while training (supporting sample_weight in your classifier is recommended but optional).

Furthermore, your estimator should be correctly clonable via sklearn.base.clone: cleanlab internally creates multiple instances of the estimator, and if you e.g. manually wrap a PyTorch model, you must ensure that every call to the estimator’s __init__() creates an independent instance of the model (for sklearn compatibility, the weights of neural network models should typically be initialized inside of clf.fit()).

Note

There are two new notions of confidence in this package:

1. Confident examples — examples we are confident are labeled correctly. We prune everything else. Mathematically, this means keeping the examples with high probability of belong to their provided label class.

2. Confident errors — examples we are confident are labeled erroneously. We prune these. Mathematically, this means pruning the examples with high probability of belong to a different class.

Examples

>>> from cleanlab.classification import CleanLearning
>>> from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression as LogReg
>>> cl = CleanLearning(clf=LogReg()) # Pass in any classifier.
>>> cl.fit(X_train, labels_maybe_with_errors)
>>> # Estimate the predictions as if you had trained without label issues.
>>> pred = cl.predict(X_test)

If the model is not sklearn-compatible by default, it might be the case that standard packages can adapt the model. For example, you can adapt PyTorch models using skorch and adapt Keras models using SciKeras.

If an open-source adapter doesn’t already exist, you can manually wrap the model to be sklearn-compatible. This is made easy by inheriting from sklearn.base.BaseEstimator:

from sklearn.base import BaseEstimator

class YourModel(BaseEstimator):
    def __init__(self, ):
        pass
    def fit(self, X, y, sample_weight=None):
        pass
    def predict(self, X):
        pass
    def predict_proba(self, X):
        pass
    def score(self, X, y, sample_weight=None):
        pass

Note

• labels refers to the given labels in the original dataset, which may have errors

• labels must be integers in 0, 1, …, K-1, where K is the total number of classes

Note

Confident learning is the state-of-the-art (Northcutt et al., 2021) for weak supervision, finding label issues in datasets, learning with noisy labels, uncertainty estimation, and more. It works with any classifier, including deep neural networks. See the clf parameter.

Confident learning is a subfield of theory and algorithms of machine learning with noisy labels. Cleanlab achieves state-of-the-art performance of any open-sourced implementation of confident learning across a variety of tasks like multi-class classification, multi-label classification, and PU learning.

Given any classifier having the predict_proba method, an input feature matrix X, and a discrete vector of noisy labels labels, confident learning estimates the classifications that would be obtained if the true labels had instead been provided to the classifier during training. labels denotes the noisy labels instead of the $\tilde{y}$ used in confident learning paper.

Classes:

CleanLearning([clf, seed, cv_n_folds, ...])

CleanLearning = Machine Learning with cleaned data (even when training on messy, error-ridden data).

class cleanlab.classification.CleanLearning(clf=None, *, seed=None, cv_n_folds=5, converge_latent_estimates=False, pulearning=None, find_label_issues_kwargs={}, label_quality_scores_kwargs={}, verbose=False)

Bases: BaseEstimator

CleanLearning = Machine Learning with cleaned data (even when training on messy, error-ridden data).

Automated and robust learning with noisy labels using any dataset and any model. This class trains a model clf with error-prone, noisy labels as if the model had been instead trained on a dataset with perfect labels. It achieves this by cleaning out the error and providing cleaned data while training. This class is currently intended for standard (multi-class) classification tasks.

Parameters:

• clf (estimator instance, optional) –

  A classifier implementing the sklearn estimator API, defining the following functions:

  • clf.fit(X, y, sample_weight=None)

  • clf.predict_proba(X)

  • clf.predict(X)

  • clf.score(X, y, sample_weight=None)

  See cleanlab.experimental for examples of sklearn wrappers, e.g. around PyTorch and FastText.

  If the model is not sklearn-compatible by default, it might be the case that standard packages can adapt the model. For example, you can adapt PyTorch models using skorch and adapt Keras models using SciKeras.

  Stores the classifier used in Confident Learning. Default classifier used is sklearn.linear_model.LogisticRegression.

• seed (int, optional) – Set the default state of the random number generator used to split the cross-validated folds. By default, uses np.random current random state.

• cv_n_folds (int, default 5) – This class needs holdout predicted probabilities for every data example and if not provided, uses cross-validation to compute them. cv_n_folds sets the number of cross-validation folds used to compute out-of-sample probabilities for each example in X.

• converge_latent_estimates (bool, optional) – If true, forces numerical consistency of latent estimates. Each is estimated independently, but they are related mathematically with closed form equivalences. This will iteratively enforce consistency.

• pulearning ({None, 0, 1}, default None) – Only works for 2 class datasets. Set to the integer of the class that is perfectly labeled (you are certain that there are no errors in that class).

• find_label_issues_kwargs (dict, optional) – Keyword arguments to pass into filter.find_label_issues. Options that may especially impact accuracy include: filter_by, frac_noise, min_examples_per_class.

• label_quality_scores_kwargs (dict, optional) – Keyword arguments to pass into rank.get_label_quality_scores. Options include: method, adjust_pred_probs.

• verbose (bool, default False) – Controls how much output is printed. Set to False to suppress print statements.

Methods:

fit(X[, labels, pred_probs, thresholds, ...])	Train the model clf with error-prone, noisy labels as if the model had been instead trained on a dataset with the correct labels.
predict(*args, **kwargs)	Predict class labels using your wrapped classifier clf.
predict_proba(*args, **kwargs)	Predict class probabilities P(true label=k) using your wrapped classifier clf.
score(X, y[, sample_weight])	Evaluates your wrapped classifier clf's score on a test set X with labels y.
find_label_issues([X, labels, pred_probs, ...])	Identifies potential label issues in the dataset using confident learning.
get_label_issues()	Accessor.
save_space()	Clears non-sklearn attributes of this estimator to save space (in-place).
get_params([deep])	Get parameters for this estimator.
set_params(**params)	Set the parameters of this estimator.

fit(X, labels=None, *, pred_probs=None, thresholds=None, noise_matrix=None, inverse_noise_matrix=None, label_issues=None, sample_weight=None, clf_kwargs={}, clf_final_kwargs={}, validation_func=None, y=None)

Train the model clf with error-prone, noisy labels as if the model had been instead trained on a dataset with the correct labels. fit achieves this by first training clf via cross-validation on the noisy data, using the resulting predicted probabilities to identify label issues, pruning the data with label issues, and finally training clf on the remaining clean data.

Parameters:

• X (np.ndarray or DatasetLike) –

  Data features (i.e. training inputs for ML), typically an array of shape (N, ...), where N is the number of examples. Supported DatasetLike types beyond np.ndarray include: pd.DataFrame, scipy.sparse.csr_matrix, torch.utils.data.Dataset, tensorflow.data.Dataset, or any dataset object X that supports list-based indexing: X[index_list] to select a subset of training examples. Your classifier that this instance was initialized with, clf, must be able to fit() and predict() data of this format.

  Note

  If providing X as a tensorflow.data.Dataset, make sure shuffle() has been called before batch() (if shuffling) and no other order-destroying operation (eg. repeat()) has been applied.

• labels (array_like) – An array of shape (N,) of noisy classification labels, where some labels may be erroneous. Elements must be integers in the set 0, 1, …, K-1, where K is the number of classes. Supported array_like types include: np.ndarray, pd.Series, or list.

• pred_probs (np.ndarray, optional) –

  An array of shape (N, K) of model-predicted probabilities, P(label=k|x). Each row of this matrix corresponds to an example x and contains the model-predicted probabilities that x belongs to each possible class, for each of the K classes. The columns must be ordered such that these probabilities correspond to class 0, 1, …, K-1. pred_probs should be out-of-sample, eg. computed via cross-validation. If provided, pred_probs will be used to find label issues rather than the clf classifier.

  Note

  If you are not sure, leave pred_probs=None (the default) and it will be computed for you using cross-validation with the provided model.

• thresholds (array_like, optional) –

  An array of shape (K, 1) or (K,) of per-class threshold probabilities, used to determine the cutoff probability necessary to consider an example as a given class label (see Northcutt et al., 2021, Section 3.1, Equation 2).

  This is for advanced users only. If not specified, these are computed for you automatically. If an example has a predicted probability greater than this threshold, it is counted as having true_label = k. This is not used for pruning/filtering, only for estimating the noise rates using confident counts.

• noise_matrix (np.ndarray, optional) – An array of shape (K, K) representing the conditional probability matrix P(label=k_s | true label=k_y), the fraction of examples in every class, labeled as every other class. Assumes columns of noise_matrix sum to 1.

• inverse_noise_matrix (np.ndarray, optional) – An array of shape (K, K) representing the conditional probability matrix P(true label=k_y | label=k_s), the estimated fraction observed examples in each class k_s that are mislabeled examples from every other class k_y, Assumes columns of inverse_noise_matrix sum to 1.

• label_issues (pd.DataFrame or np.ndarray, optional) –

  Specifies the label issues for each example in dataset. If pd.DataFrame, must be formatted as the one returned by: CleanLearning.find_label_issues or CleanLearning.get_label_issues. If np.ndarray, must contain either boolean label_issues_mask as output by: default filter.find_label_issues, or integer indices as output by filter.find_label_issues with its return_indices_ranked_by argument specified. Providing this argument significantly reduces the time this method takes to run by skipping the slow cross-validation step necessary to find label issues. Examples identified to have label issues will be pruned from the data before training the final clf model.

  Caution: If you provide label_issues without having previously called self.find_label_issues, e.g. as a np.ndarray, then some functionality like training with sample weights may be disabled.

• sample_weight (array_like, optional) – Array of weights with shape (N,) that are assigned to individual samples, assuming total number of examples in dataset is N. If not provided, samples may still be weighted by the estimated noise in the class they are labeled as.

• clf_kwargs (dict, optional) – Optional keyword arguments to pass into clf’s fit() method.

• clf_final_kwargs (dict, optional) – Optional extra keyword arguments to pass into the final clf fit() on the cleaned data but not the clf fit() in each fold of cross-validation on the noisy data. The final fit() will also receive clf_kwargs, but these may be overwritten by values in clf_final_kwargs. This can be useful for training differently in the final fit() than during cross-validation.

• validation_func (callable, optional) –

  Optional callable function that takes two arguments, X_val, y_val, and returns a dict of keyword arguments passed into to clf.fit() which may be functions of the validation data in each cross-validation fold. Specifies how to map the validation data split in each cross-validation fold into the appropriate format to pass into clf’s fit() method, assuming clf.fit() can utilize validation data if it is appropriately passed in (eg. for early-stopping). Eg. if your model’s fit() method is called using clf.fit(X, y, X_validation, y_validation), then you could set validation_func = f where def f(X_val, y_val): return {"X_validation": X_val, "y_validation": y_val}

  Note that validation_func will be ignored in the final call to clf.fit() on the cleaned subset of the data. This argument is only for allowing clf to access the validation data in each cross-validation fold (eg. for early-stopping or hyperparameter-selection purposes). If you want to pass in validation data even in the final training call to clf.fit() on the cleaned data subset, you should explicitly pass in that data yourself (eg. via clf_final_kwargs or clf_kwargs).

• y (array_like, optional) – Alternative argument that can be specified instead of labels. Specifying y has the same effect as specifying labels, and is offered as an alternative for compatibility with sklearn.

Return type:

Self

Returns:

self (CleanLearning) – Fitted estimator that has all the same methods as any sklearn estimator.

After calling self.fit(), this estimator also stores extra attributes such as:

• self.label_issues_df: a pd.DataFrame accessible via

get_label_issues of similar format as the one returned by: CleanLearning.find_label_issues. See documentation of CleanLearning.find_label_issues for column descriptions.

After calling self.fit(), self.label_issues_df may also contain an extra column:

• sample_weight: Numeric values that were used to weight examples during the final training of clf in CleanLearning.fit(). sample_weight column will only be present if automatic sample weights were actually used. These automatic weights are assigned to each example based on the class it belongs to, i.e. there are only num_classes unique sample_weight values. The sample weight for an example belonging to class k is computed as 1 / p(given_label = k | true_label = k). This sample_weight normalizes the loss to effectively trick clf into learning with the distribution of the true labels by accounting for the noisy data pruned out prior to training on cleaned data. In other words, examples with label issues were removed, so this weights the data proportionally so that the classifier trains as if it had all the true labels, not just the subset of cleaned data left after pruning out the label issues.

Note

If CleanLearning.fit() does not work for your data/model, you can run the same procedure yourself: * Utilize cross-validation to get out-of-sample pred_probs for each example. * Call filter.find_label_issues with pred_probs. * Filter the examples with detected issues and train your model on the remaining data.

predict(*args, **kwargs)

Predict class labels using your wrapped classifier clf. Works just like clf.predict().

Parameters:

X (np.ndarray or DatasetLike) – Test data in the same format expected by your wrapped classifier.

Return type:

ndarray

Returns:

class_predictions (np.ndarray) – Vector of class predictions for the test examples.

predict_proba(*args, **kwargs)

Predict class probabilities P(true label=k) using your wrapped classifier clf. Works just like clf.predict_proba().

Parameters:

X (np.ndarray or DatasetLike) – Test data in the same format expected by your wrapped classifier.

Return type:

ndarray

Returns:

pred_probs (np.ndarray) – (N x K) array of predicted class probabilities, one row for each test example.

score(X, y, sample_weight=None)

Evaluates your wrapped classifier clf’s score on a test set X with labels y. Uses your model’s default scoring function, or simply accuracy if your model as no "score" attribute.

Parameters:

• X (np.ndarray or DatasetLike) – Test data in the same format expected by your wrapped classifier.

• y (array_like) – Test labels in the same format as labels previously used in fit().

• sample_weight (np.ndarray, optional) – An array of shape (N,) or (N, 1) used to weight each test example when computing the score.

Return type:

float

Returns:

score (float) – Number quantifying the performance of this classifier on the test data.

find_label_issues(X=None, labels=None, *, pred_probs=None, thresholds=None, noise_matrix=None, inverse_noise_matrix=None, save_space=False, clf_kwargs={}, validation_func=None)

Identifies potential label issues in the dataset using confident learning.

Runs cross-validation to get out-of-sample pred_probs from clf and then calls filter.find_label_issues to find label issues. These label issues are cached internally and returned in a pandas DataFrame. Kwargs for filter.find_label_issues must have already been specified in the initialization of this class, not here.

Unlike filter.find_label_issues, which requires pred_probs, this method only requires a classifier and it can do the cross-validation for you. Both methods return the same boolean mask that identifies which examples have label issues. This is the preferred method to use if you plan to subsequently invoke: CleanLearning.fit().

Note: this method computes the label issues from scratch. To access previously-computed label issues from this CleanLearning instance, use the get_label_issues method.

This is the method called to find label issues inside CleanLearning.fit() and they share mostly the same parameters.

Parameters:

save_space (bool, optional) – If True, then returned label_issues_df will not be stored as attribute. This means some other methods like self.get_label_issues() will no longer work.

For info about the other parameters, see the docstring of CleanLearning.fit().

Return type:

DataFrame

Returns:

label_issues_df (pd.DataFrame) – DataFrame with info about label issues for each example. Unless save_space argument is specified, same DataFrame is also stored as self.label_issues_df attribute accessible via get_label_issues. Each row represents an example from our dataset and the DataFrame may contain the following columns:

• is_label_issue: boolean mask for the entire dataset where True represents a label issue and False represents an example that is accurately labeled with high confidence. This column is equivalent to label_issues_mask output from filter.find_label_issues.

• label_quality: Numeric score that measures the quality of each label (how likely it is to be correct, with lower scores indicating potentially erroneous labels).

• given_label: Integer indices corresponding to the class label originally given for this example (same as labels input). Included here for ease of comparison against clf predictions, only present if “predicted_label” column is present.

• predicted_label: Integer indices corresponding to the class predicted by trained clf model. Only present if pred_probs were provided as input or computed during label-issue-finding.

• sample_weight: Numeric values used to weight examples during the final training of clf in CleanLearning.fit(). This column may not be present after self.find_label_issues() but may be added after call to CleanLearning.fit(). For more precise definition of sample weights, see documentation of CleanLearning.fit()

get_label_issues()

Accessor. Returns label_issues_df attribute if previously already computed. This pd.DataFrame describes the label issues identified for each example (each row corresponds to an example). For column definitions, see the documentation of CleanLearning.find_label_issues.

Return type:

Optional[DataFrame]

Returns:

label_issues_df (pd.DataFrame) – DataFrame with (precomputed) info about label issues for each example.

save_space()

Clears non-sklearn attributes of this estimator to save space (in-place). This includes the DataFrame attribute that stored label issues which may be large for big datasets. You may want to call this method before deploying this model (i.e. if you just care about producing predictions). After calling this method, certain non-prediction-related attributes/functionality will no longer be available (e.g. you cannot call self.fit() anymore).

get_params(deep=True)

Get parameters for this estimator.

Parameters:

deep (bool, default True) – If True, will return the parameters for this estimator and contained subobjects that are estimators.

Returns:

params (dict) – Parameter names mapped to their values.

set_params(**params)

Set the parameters of this estimator.

The method works on simple estimators as well as on nested objects (such as Pipeline). The latter have parameters of the form <component>__<parameter> so that it’s possible to update each component of a nested object.

Parameters:

**params (dict) – Estimator parameters.

Returns:

self (estimator instance) – Estimator instance.