# Ballpark Learning: Estimating Labels from Rough Group Comparisons

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Multi-Vector Models with Textual Guidance for Fine-Grained Scientific Document Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08366/) (2021)
- [The Lean Data Scientist: Recent Advances towards Overcoming the Data Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.07959/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We are interested in estimating individual labels given only coarse, aggregated signal over the data points. In our setting, we receive sets ("bags") of unlabeled instances with constraints on label proportions. We relax the unrealistic assumption of known label proportions, made in previous work; instead, we assume only to have upper and lower bounds, and constraints on bag differences. We motivate the problem, propose an intuitive formulation and algorithm, and apply our methods to real-world scenarios. Across several domains, we show how using only proportion constraints and no labeled examples, we can achieve surprisingly high accuracy. In particular, we demonstrate how to predict income level using rough stereotypes and how to perform sentiment analysis using very little information. We also apply our method to guide exploratory analysis, recovering geographical differences in twitter dialect.