Nuances of Interrater Agreement on Automatic Affect Prediction from Physiological Signals

Abstract

This study explores the influence of interrater agreement measures and affect representation schemes in automatic affect prediction systems using physiological signals. These systems often use supervised learning and require unambiguous and objective labeling, a challenge when multiple human annotators are involved, which can affect model performance.
The research involved the first part of a two-stage process: systematically reviewing datasets and their characteristics concerning interrater agreement on the affective interpretation of physiological signals. This stage established a reliable foundation for the second step: a future analysis of model performance reported in technical papers utilizing these datasets. The main takeaways were that the number of raters varies significantly over datasets and the complexity introduced by combining affect representation schemes can negatively affect interrater agreement.