Uncovering bias in the PlantVillage dataset

9 Jun 2022  ·  Mehmet Alican Noyan ·

We report our investigation on the use of the popular PlantVillage dataset for training deep learning based plant disease detection models. We trained a machine learning model using only 8 pixels from the PlantVillage image backgrounds. The model achieved 49.0% accuracy on the held-out test set, well above the random guessing accuracy of 2.6%. This result indicates that the PlantVillage dataset contains noise correlated with the labels and deep learning models can easily exploit this bias to make predictions. Possible approaches to alleviate this problem are discussed.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Bias Detection PlantVillage_8px RandomForest_default_hyperparameters Accuracy (%) 49.0 # 1

Methods