# Data Labeling Tip¶

I have spent a lot of time labeling lately, and I have two guiding principles:

1. Where you can, automatically label.

2. Make it easy to correct automatic labels.

Automatically Label

If you had a perfect labeling oracle, you probably would not need to be training a supervised classification model; you would already have an unsupervised model. But you may have a strongly correlated feature or other algorithm that can label your data with some degree of uncertainty. Take this win when you can. Use some substandard method to generate the majority of the labels for you, then spend your work-hours cleaning them up (instead of generating them from scratch). For my main use case, peak detection labeled about 70% accurately. This isn’t an acceptable accuracy for production, but it is good enough to save me some time.

Correct Labels

Next, I recommend matplotlib’s jupyter extension and event handling to do your label correction.

1. Use your labeling oracle to generate a list of labels and their location. For a binary classification task on time series data, I just used the index of each positive class prediction.

2. Plot these label predictions over your data stream.

3. Use the interactive plot to scroll and zoom through your data.

4. Assign matplotlib events to add or remove labels from your label list. In this example, we use the z key to add labels and the x key to remove labels (at the mouseover location).

add_list = []
remove_list = []
def onkey(event):
if event.key == 'z':