-->

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Active learning is a special case of semi-supervised machine learning in which a learning algorithm is able to interactively query the user (or some other information source) to obtain the desired outputs at new data points. In statistics literature it is sometimes also called optimal experimental design.

There are situations in which unlabeled data is abundant but manually labeling is expensive. In such a scenario, learning algorithms can actively query the user/teacher for labels. This type of iterative supervised learning is called active learning. Since the learner chooses the examples, the number of examples to learn a concept can often be much lower than the number required in normal supervised learning. With this approach, there is a risk that the algorithm be overwhelmed by uninformative examples. Recent developments are dedicated to multi-label active learning, hybrid active learning and active learning in a single-pass (on-line) context, combining concepts from the field of Machine Learning (e.g., conflict and ignorance) with adaptive, incremental learning policies in the field of Online machine learning.

Definitions


File:Cone of learning export 11x17.png - Wikipedia
File:Cone of learning export 11x17.png - Wikipedia. Source : en.wikipedia.org

Let T {\displaystyle T} be the total set of all data under consideration. For example, in a protein engineering problem, T {\displaystyle T} would include all proteins that are known to have a certain interesting activity and all additional proteins that one might want to test for that activity.

During each iteration, i {\displaystyle i} , T {\displaystyle T} is broken up into three subsets

  1. T K , i {\displaystyle \mathbf {T} _{K,i}} : Data points where the label is known.
  2. T U , i {\displaystyle \mathbf {T} _{U,i}} : Data points where the label is unknown.
  3. T C , i {\displaystyle \mathbf {T} _{C,i}} : A subset of T U , i {\displaystyle T_{U,i}} that is chosen to be labeled.

Most of the current research in active learning involves the best method to choose the data points for T C , i {\displaystyle T_{C,i}} .

Query strategies


Weak Supervision: The New Programming Paradigm for Machine Learning
Weak Supervision: The New Programming Paradigm for Machine Learning. Source : hazyresearch.github.io

Algorithms for determining which data points should be labeled can be organized into a number of different categories:

  • Uncertainty sampling: label those points for which the current model is least certain as to what the correct output should be
  • Query by committee: a variety of models are trained on the current labeled data, and vote on the output for unlabeled data; label those points for which the "committee" disagrees the most
  • Expected model change: label those points that would most change the current model
  • Expected error reduction: label those points that would most reduce the model's generalization error
  • Variance reduction: label those points that would minimize output variance, which is one of the components of error
  • Balance exploration and exploitation: the choice of examples to label is seen as a dilemma between the exploration and the exploitation over the data space representation. This strategy manages this compromise by modelling the active learning problem as a contextual bandit problem. For example, Bouneffouf et al. propose a sequential algorithm named Active Thompson Sampling (ATS), which, in each round, assigns a sampling distribution on the pool, samples one point from this distribution, and queries the oracle for this sample point label.
  • Exponentiated Gradient Exploration for Active Learning: In this paper, the author proposes a sequential algorithm named exponentiated gradient (EG)-active that can improve any active learning algorithm by an optimal random exploration.

A wide variety of algorithms have been studied that fall into these categories.

Minimum Marginal Hyperplane


Matroid (company) - Wikipedia
Matroid (company) - Wikipedia. Source : en.wikipedia.org

Some active learning algorithms are built upon Support vector machines (SVMs) and exploit the structure of the SVM to determine which data points to label. Such methods usually calculate the margin, W {\displaystyle W} , of each unlabeled datum in T U , i {\displaystyle T_{U,i}} and treat W {\displaystyle W} as an n {\displaystyle n} -dimensional distance from that datum to the separating hyperplane.

Minimum Marginal Hyperplane methods assume that the data with the smallest W {\displaystyle W} are those that the SVM is most uncertain about and therefore should be placed in T C , i {\displaystyle T_{C,i}} to be labeled. Other similar methods, such as Maximum Marginal Hyperplane, choose data with the largest W {\displaystyle W} . Tradeoff methods choose a mix of the smallest and largest W {\displaystyle W} s.


See also


Steve Blank Startup Tools
Steve Blank Startup Tools. Source : steveblank.com

  • Proactive learning
  • List of datasets for machine learning research

Notes


Wikis | Chapter 18 - Language of Artificial Intelligence and its ...
Wikis | Chapter 18 - Language of Artificial Intelligence and its .... Source : blogs.ntu.edu.sg

Other references


best mba essay editing websites ca personal essay editor sites gb ...
best mba essay editing websites ca personal essay editor sites gb .... Source : www.callbacknews.com

  • N. Rubens, M. Elahi, M. Sugiyama, D. Kaplan. Recommender Systems Handbook: Active Learning in Recommender Systems (eds. F. Ricci, P.B. Kantor, L. Rokach, B. Shapira). Springer, 2015 [1], [2].
  • Active Learning Tutorial, S. Dasgupta and J. Langford.

Adaptive learning - Wikipedia
Adaptive learning - Wikipedia. Source : en.wikipedia.org

 
Sponsored Links