Interactive Machine Learning with Applications in Health Informatics

Recent years have witnessed unprecedented growth of health data, including millions of biomedical research publications, electronic health records, patient discussions on health forums and social media, fitness tracker trajectories, and genome sequences. Information retrieval and machine learning techniques are powerful tools to unlock invaluable knowledge in these data, yet they need to be guided by human experts. Unlike training machine learning models in other domains, labeling and analyzing health data requires highly specialized expertise, and the time of medical experts is extremely limited. How can we mine big health data with little expert effort? In this dissertation, I develop state-of-the-art interactive machine learning algorithms that bring together human intelligence and machine intelligence in health data mining tasks. By making efficient use of human expert's domain knowledge, we can achieve high-quality solutions with minimal manual effort. I first introduce a high-recall information retrieval framework that helps human users efficiently harvest not just one but as many relevant documents as possible from a searchable corpus. This is a common need in professional search scenarios such as medical search and literature review. Then I develop two interactive machine learning algorithms that leverage human expert's domain knowledge to combat the curse of "cold start" in active learning, with applications in clinical natural language processing. A consistent empirical observation is that the overall learning process can be reliably accelerated by a knowledge-driven "warm start", followed by machine-initiated active learning. As a theoretical contribution, I propose a general framework for interactive machine learning. Under this framework, a unified optimization objective explains many existing algorithms used in practice, and inspires the design of new algorithms.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147518/1/raywang_1.pd

Combining semi-supervised and active learning to recognize minority senses in a new corpus

Ponencia presentada en la 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Workshop on Replicability and Reproducibility in Natural Language Processing: adaptive methods, resources and software. Buenos Aires, Argentina, del 25 al 31 de julio de 2015.In this paper we study the impact of combining active learning with bootstrapping to grow a small annotated corpus from a different, unannotated corpus. The intuition underlying our approach is that bootstrapping includes instances that are closer to the generative centers of the data, while discriminative approaches to active learning include instances that are closer to the decision boundaries of classifiers. We build an initial model from the original annotated corpus, which is then iteratively enlarged by including both manually annotated examples and automatically labelled examples as training examples for the following iteration. Examples to be annotated are selected in each iteration by applying active learning techniques. We show that intertwining an active learning component in a bootstrapping approach helps to overcome an initial bias towards a majority class, thus facilitating adaptation of a starting dataset towards the real distribution of a different, unannotated corpus.Fil: Cardellino, Cristian Adrián. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: Teruel, Milagro. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: Alonso i Alemany, Laura. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Otras Ciencias de la Computación e Informació

A literature survey of active machine learning in the context of natural language processing

Active learning is a supervised machine learning technique in which the learner is in control of the data used for learning. That control is utilized by the learner to ask an oracle, typically a human with extensive knowledge of the domain at hand, about the classes of the instances for which the model learned so far makes unreliable predictions. The active learning process takes as input a set of labeled examples, as well as a larger set of unlabeled examples, and produces a classifier and a relatively small set of newly labeled data. The overall goal is to create as good a classifier as possible, without having to mark-up and supply the learner with more data than necessary. The learning process aims at keeping the human annotation effort to a minimum, only asking for advice where the training utility of the result of such a query is high. Active learning has been successfully applied to a number of natural language processing tasks, such as, information extraction, named entity recognition, text categorization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, and word sense disambiguation. This report is a literature survey of active learning from the perspective of natural language processing

Bringing Active Learning to Life

Active learning has been applied to different NLP tasks, with the aim of limiting the amount of time and cost for human annotation. Most studies on active learning have only simulated the annotation scenario, using prelabelled gold standard data. We present the first active learning experiment for Word Sense Disambiguation with human annotators in a realistic environment, using fine-grained sense distinctions, and investigate whether AL can reduce annotation cost and boost classifier performance when applied to a real-world task

Bag-Level Aggregation for Multiple Instance Active Learning in Instance Classification Problems

A growing number of applications, e.g. video surveillance and medical image analysis, require training recognition systems from large amounts of weakly annotated data while some targeted interactions with a domain expert are allowed to improve the training process. In such cases, active learning (AL) can reduce labeling costs for training a classifier by querying the expert to provide the labels of most informative instances. This paper focuses on AL methods for instance classification problems in multiple instance learning (MIL), where data is arranged into sets, called bags, that are weakly labeled. Most AL methods focus on single instance learning problems. These methods are not suitable for MIL problems because they cannot account for the bag structure of data. In this paper, new methods for bag-level aggregation of instance informativeness are proposed for multiple instance active learning (MIAL). The \textit{aggregated informativeness} method identifies the most informative instances based on classifier uncertainty, and queries bags incorporating the most information. The other proposed method, called \textit{cluster-based aggregative sampling}, clusters data hierarchically in the instance space. The informativeness of instances is assessed by considering bag labels, inferred instance labels, and the proportion of labels that remain to be discovered in clusters. Both proposed methods significantly outperform reference methods in extensive experiments using benchmark data from several application domains. Results indicate that using an appropriate strategy to address MIAL problems yields a significant reduction in the number of queries needed to achieve the same level of performance as single instance AL methods

Active Discriminative Text Representation Learning

We propose a new active learning (AL) method for text classification with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In AL, one selects the instances to be manually labeled with the aim of maximizing model performance with minimal effort. Neural models capitalize on word embeddings as representations (features), tuning these to the task at hand. We argue that AL strategies for multi-layered neural models should focus on selecting instances that most affect the embedding space (i.e., induce discriminative word representations). This is in contrast to traditional AL approaches (e.g., entropy-based uncertainty sampling), which specify higher level objectives. We propose a simple approach for sentence classification that selects instances containing words whose embeddings are likely to be updated with the greatest magnitude, thereby rapidly learning discriminative, task-specific embeddings. We extend this approach to document classification by jointly considering: (1) the expected changes to the constituent word representations; and (2) the model's current overall uncertainty regarding the instance. The relative emphasis placed on these criteria is governed by a stochastic process that favors selecting instances likely to improve representations at the outset of learning, and then shifts toward general uncertainty sampling as AL progresses. Empirical results show that our method outperforms baseline AL approaches on both sentence and document classification tasks. We also show that, as expected, the method quickly learns discriminative word embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on AL addressing neural models for text classification.Comment: This paper got accepted by AAAI 201

Reversing uncertainty sampling to improve active learning schemes

Active learning provides promising methods to optimize the cost of manually annotating a dataset. However, practitioners in many areas do not massively resort to such methods because they present technical difficulties and do not provide a guarantee of good performance, especially in skewed distributions with scarcely populated minority classes and an undefined, catch-all majority class, which are very common in human-related phenomena like natural language. In this paper we present a comparison of the simplest active learning technique, pool-based uncertainty sampling, and its opposite, which we call reversed uncertainty sampling. We show that both obtain results comparable to the random, arguing for a more insightful approach to active learning.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Reversing uncertainty sampling to improve active learning schemes

Active learning provides promising methods to optimize the cost of manually annotating a dataset. However, practitioners in many areas do not massively resort to such methods because they present technical difficulties and do not provide a guarantee of good performance, especially in skewed distributions with scarcely populated minority classes and an undefined, catch-all majority class, which are very common in human-related phenomena like natural language. In this paper we present a comparison of the simplest active learning technique, pool-based uncertainty sampling, and its opposite, which we call reversed uncertainty sampling. We show that both obtain results comparable to the random, arguing for a more insightful approach to active learning.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Reversing uncertainty sampling to improve active learning schemes

Ponencia presentada en el 16º Simposio Argentino de Inteligencia Artificial. 44 Jornadas Argentinas de Informática. Rosario, Argentina, del 31 de agosto al 4 de septiembre de 2015.Active learning provides promising methods to optimize the cost of manually annotating a dataset. However, practitioners in many areas do not massively resort to such methods because they present technical difficulties and do not provide a guarantee of good performance, especially in skewed distributions with scarcely populated minority classes and an undefined, catch-all majority class, which are very common in human-related phenomena like natural language. In this paper we present a comparison of the simplest active learning technique, pool-based uncertainty sampling, and its opposite, which we call reversed uncertainty sampling. We show that both obtain results comparable to the random, arguing for a more insightful approach to active learning.http://44jaiio.sadio.org.ar/asaiFil: Cardellino, Cristian Adrián. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: Teruel, Milagro. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Fil: Alonso i Alemany, Laura. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física; Argentina.Ciencias de la Computació