42,204 research outputs found
A survey of cost-sensitive decision tree induction algorithms
The past decade has seen a significant interest on the problem of inducing decision trees that take account of costs of misclassification and costs of acquiring the features used for decision making. This survey identifies over 50 algorithms including approaches that are direct adaptations of accuracy based methods, use genetic algorithms, use anytime methods and utilize boosting and bagging. The survey brings together these different studies and novel approaches to cost-sensitive decision tree learning, provides a useful taxonomy, a historical timeline of how the field has developed and should provide a useful reference point for future research in this field
Selecting Near-Optimal Learners via Incremental Data Allocation
We study a novel machine learning (ML) problem setting of sequentially
allocating small subsets of training data amongst a large set of classifiers.
The goal is to select a classifier that will give near-optimal accuracy when
trained on all data, while also minimizing the cost of misallocated samples.
This is motivated by large modern datasets and ML toolkits with many
combinations of learning algorithms and hyper-parameters. Inspired by the
principle of "optimism under uncertainty," we propose an innovative strategy,
Data Allocation using Upper Bounds (DAUB), which robustly achieves these
objectives across a variety of real-world datasets.
We further develop substantial theoretical support for DAUB in an idealized
setting where the expected accuracy of a classifier trained on samples can
be known exactly. Under these conditions we establish a rigorous sub-linear
bound on the regret of the approach (in terms of misallocated data), as well as
a rigorous bound on suboptimality of the selected classifier. Our accuracy
estimates using real-world datasets only entail mild violations of the
theoretical scenario, suggesting that the practical behavior of DAUB is likely
to approach the idealized behavior.Comment: AAAI-2016: The Thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenc
Predictive User Modeling with Actionable Attributes
Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for
modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the
traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable
variables, called attributes. The goal is to learn a model for predicting the
target variable for unseen instances. For example, for marketing purposes a
company consider profiling a new user based on her observed web browsing
behavior, referral keywords or other relevant information. In many real world
applications the values of some attributes are not only observable, but can be
actively decided by a decision maker. Furthermore, in some of such applications
the decision maker is interested not only to generate accurate predictions, but
to maximize the probability of the desired outcome. For example, a direct
marketing manager can choose which type of a special offer to send to a client
(actionable attribute), hoping that the right choice will result in a positive
response with a higher probability. We study how to learn to choose the value
of an actionable attribute in order to maximize the probability of a desired
outcome in predictive modeling. We emphasize that not all instances are equally
sensitive to changes in actions. Accurate choice of an action is critical for
those instances, which are on the borderline (e.g. users who do not have a
strong opinion one way or the other). We formulate three supervised learning
approaches for learning to select the value of an actionable attribute at an
instance level. We also introduce a focused training procedure which puts more
emphasis on the situations where varying the action is the most likely to take
the effect. The proof of concept experimental validation on two real-world case
studies in web analytics and e-learning domains highlights the potential of the
proposed approaches
Stacking classifiers for anti-spam filtering of e-mail
We evaluate empirically a scheme for combining classifiers, known as stacked
generalization, in the context of anti-spam filtering, a novel cost-sensitive
application of text categorization. Unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam",
floods mailboxes, causing frustration, wasting bandwidth, and exposing minors
to unsuitable content. Using a public corpus, we show that stacking can improve
the efficiency of automatically induced anti-spam filters, and that such
filters can be used in real-life applications
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