Essay

Why does correcting only the labels of examples the model got wrong distort measured accuracy?

Question: A team reviews a validation set for an image classifier and fixes labels only for the cases the model predicted incorrectly. What happens to the reported accuracy, and why does it differ from the model’s true performance?

Sample answer: This process can only turn some counted mistakes into correct predictions. Because the team checks only examples already marked wrong by the current labels, it never examines the cases the model predicted correctly. As a result, the measured number of errors goes down while the number of counted correct predictions goes up, even though the evaluation set has not been fully cleaned. The reported accuracy therefore becomes too optimistic and can overstate how well the system really performs.

Key points:

  • Only examples already counted as errors are inspected and relabeled.
  • Any label problems on examples the model predicted correctly are left untouched.
  • The recorded accuracy becomes artificially high, so the evaluation is biased upward.

Rubric: The response must explain: 1. only examples the model missed are checked, so the measured error rate can only decrease; 2. correctly predicted examples with bad labels are not corrected; 3. this selective relabeling makes the reported accuracy overly optimistic.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Supervised Learning

Dive into Deep Learning @ D2L

Data Science

Machine Learning Strategy

Machine Learning Yearning @ DeepLearning.AI

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