A Multi-Armed Bandit to Smartly Select a Training Set from Big Medical Data

With the availability of big medical image data, the selection of an adequate training set is becoming more important to address the heterogeneity of different datasets. Simply including all the data does not only incur high processing costs but can even harm the prediction. We formulate the smart and efficient selection of a training dataset from big medical image data as a multi-armed bandit problem, solved by Thompson sampling. Our method assumes that image features are not available at the time of the selection of the samples, and therefore relies only on meta information associated with the images. Our strategy simultaneously exploits data sources with high chances of yielding useful samples and explores new data regions. For our evaluation, we focus on the application of estimating the age from a brain MRI. Our results on 7,250 subjects from 10 datasets show that our approach leads to higher accuracy while only requiring a fraction of the training data.Comment: MICCAI 2017 Proceeding

Learning Active Learning from Data

In this paper, we suggest a novel data-driven approach to active learning (AL). The key idea is to train a regressor that predicts the expected error reduction for a candidate sample in a particular learning state. By formulating the query selection procedure as a regression problem we are not restricted to working with existing AL heuristics; instead, we learn strategies based on experience from previous AL outcomes. We show that a strategy can be learnt either from simple synthetic 2D datasets or from a subset of domain-specific data. Our method yields strategies that work well on real data from a wide range of domains

An Efficient Learning of Constraints For Semi-Supervised Clustering using Neighbour Clustering Algorithm

Data mining is the process of finding the previously unknown and potentially interesting patterns and relation in database. Data mining is the step in the knowledge discovery in database process (KDD) .The structures that are the outcome of the data mining process must meet certain condition so that these can be considered as knowledge. These conditions are validity, understandability, utility, novelty, interestingness. Researcher identifies two fundamental goals of data mining: prediction and description. The proposed research work suggests the semi-supervised clustering problem where to know (with varying degree of certainty) that some sample pairs are (or are not) in the same class. A probabilistic model for semi-supervised clustering based on Shared Semi-supervised Neighbor clustering (SSNC) that provides a principled framework for incorporating supervision into prototype-based clustering. Semi-supervised clustering that combines the constraint-based and fitness-based approaches in a unified model. The proposed method first divides the Constraint-sensitive assignment of instances to clusters, where points are assigned to clusters so that the overall distortion of the points from the cluster centroids is minimized, while a minimum number of must-link and cannot-link constraints are violated. Experimental results across UCL Machine learning semi-supervised dataset results show that the proposed method has higher F-Measures than many existing Semi-Supervised Clustering methods

Robustness of Bayesian Pool-based Active Learning Against Prior Misspecification

We study the robustness of active learning (AL) algorithms against prior misspecification: whether an algorithm achieves similar performance using a perturbed prior as compared to using the true prior. In both the average and worst cases of the maximum coverage setting, we prove that all $\alpha$-approximate algorithms are robust (i.e., near $\alpha$-approximate) if the utility is Lipschitz continuous in the prior. We further show that robustness may not be achieved if the utility is non-Lipschitz. This suggests we should use a Lipschitz utility for AL if robustness is required. For the minimum cost setting, we can also obtain a robustness result for approximate AL algorithms. Our results imply that many commonly used AL algorithms are robust against perturbed priors. We then propose the use of a mixture prior to alleviate the problem of prior misspecification. We analyze the robustness of the uniform mixture prior and show experimentally that it performs reasonably well in practice.Comment: This paper is published at AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016