Counting with the Crowd

Summary: Crowdsourced selectivity estimation for predicates without full scans, leveraging workers to estimate the fraction of items satisfying a property. Counts (showing items) excel for image datasets, while sampled labeling wins on text; a spammer/collusion detector boosts accuracy by up to 100×. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10734
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 9.4972788e-05
Overall Rank: 1,910 | 86.90%
DOI: 10.14778/2536222.2536228

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Adam Marcus (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
2. David Karger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
3. Samuel Madden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
4. Robert Miller (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
5. Sewoong Oh (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

BibTeX Citation

@article{marcus_vldb13,
        title = {{Counting with the Crowd}},
        author = {Marcus, Adam and Karger, David and Madden, Samuel and Miller, Robert and Oh, Sewoong},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {2},
        pages = {109--120},
        doi = {10.14778/2536222.2536228},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2536222.2536228},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,643	Falcon: Scaling Up Hands-Off Crowdsourced Entity Matching to Build Cloud Services	2017	SIGMOD	0.00010134956
2,570	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.4061164e-05
2,626	Scaling Up Crowd-Sourcing to Very Large Datasets: A Case for Active Learning	2015	VLDB	8.3291889e-05
3,904	QASCA: A Quality-Aware Task Assignment System for Crowdsourcing Applications	2015	SIGMOD	7.0304212e-05
3,971	CLAMShell: Speeding up Crowds for Low-latency Data Labeling	2016	VLDB	6.9835263e-05
4,050	Revisiting Prompt Engineering via Declarative Crowdsourcing	2024	CIDR	6.9368666e-05
5,813	Efficient Algorithms for Crowd-Aided Categorization	2020	VLDB	6.0780519e-05
6,471	QOCO: A Query Oriented Data Cleaning System with Oracles	2015	VLDB	5.8702801e-05
7,021	Budget Constrained Interactive Search for Multiple Targets	2021	VLDB	5.7242766e-05
7,081	OASSIS: Query Driven Crowd Mining	2014	SIGMOD	5.7086247e-05
7,313	Interactive Graph Search	2019	SIGMOD	5.6480084e-05
7,357	Crowdsourced Data Management: Overview and Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.6346837e-05
7,493	Human-in-the-loop Data Integration	2017	VLDB	5.6046905e-05
8,788	Managing General and Individual Knowledge in Crowd Mining Applications	2015	CIDR	5.3726124e-05
8,868	SemBench: A Benchmark for Semantic Query Processing Engines	2026	VLDB	5.3546848e-05
9,275	Ontology Assisted Crowd Mining	2014	VLDB	5.2940303e-05
9,401	CDB: Optimizing Queries with Crowd-Based Selections and Joins	2017	SIGMOD	5.2755515e-05
9,812	Interactive Graph Search for Multiple Targets on DAGs	2025	VLDB	5.214913e-05
11,912	A Rating-Ranking Method for Crowdsourced Top-k Computation	2018	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 6 of 6 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
90	CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing	2011	SIGMOD	0.00034951786
250	Answering Queries using Humans, Algorithms and Databases	2011	CIDR	0.00023261164
251	Crowdsourced Databases: Query Processing with People	2011	CIDR	0.00023261113
265	Human-powered Sorts and Joins	2012	VLDB	0.00022935368
743	So Who Won? Dynamic Max Discovery with the Crowd	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014421358
997	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012755983

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	9,401	CDB: Optimizing Queries with Crowd-Based Selections and Joins	2017	SIGMOD
2	55	Statistical Estimators for Relational Algebra Expressions	1988	PODS
3	2,626	Scaling Up Crowd-Sourcing to Very Large Datasets: A Case for Active Learning	2015	VLDB
4	90	CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing	2011	SIGMOD
5	3,215	Every Row Counts: Combining Sketches and Sampling for Accurate Group-By Result Estimates	2019	CIDR
6	265	Human-powered Sorts and Joins	2012	VLDB
7	4,915	Crowdsourced Top-k Algorithms: An Experimental Evaluation	2016	VLDB
8	997	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD
9	251	Crowdsourced Databases: Query Processing with People	2011	CIDR
10	7,048	Learning to Sample: Counting with Complex Queries	2020	VLDB