Datasets with entropy below 0.5 are difficult to augment enough to beat majority-label guessing¶
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Evidence · 1 study · causalr2·q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Subclaims¶
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q2 i? Only one classifier/augmentation combination outperformed blind majority-label guessing on concept C1 (89% majority, entropy 0.485), and the authors conclude datasets with entropy below 0.5 are hard to augment sufficiently. → Keith Cochran 2025
Evidence¶
Keith Cochran 2025¶
Keith Cochran, Clayton Cohn, Jean-François Rouet, Peter Hastings. (2025). Comparing Text Augmentation by GPT-3.5 and Llama3 for Evaluating Student Responses. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40593-025-00473-x
q2 · i? · causal · r2
Analysis of the severely imbalanced C1 concept (89% majority label, entropy 0.485), where the a priori majority baseline beat augmented classifiers in three of four models. Datasets with "entropy of less than 0.5" resisted augmentation.
"We concluded from our experimentation that data sets with an entropy of less than 0.5 were challenging to augment sufficiently (i.e., with enough generated data) to create a classifier that would outperform simply guessing the majority label."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- LLM-generated responses outperform self-augmentation when augmenting small educational classification datasets — related
- Fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers on LLM-augmented student-response data outperforms unaugmented training for all tested concepts — related
- Augmentation levels below 20x produce unreliable classification performance in small educational datasets — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
low-entropy-datasets-resist-augmentation |
title |
Datasets with entropy below 0.5 are difficult to augment enough to beat majority-label guessing |
description |
Datasets with entropy below 0.5 are difficult to augment enough to beat majority-label guessing |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2025 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-27 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — keith-cochran-2025 |
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