Online active learning with expert advice

Singapore National Research Foundation under International Research Centre @ Singapore Funding Initiativ

Active Learning with Expert Advice

Conventional learning with expert advice methods assumes a learner is always receiving the outcome (e.g., class labels) of every incoming training instance at the end of each trial. In real applications, acquiring the outcome from oracle can be costly or time consuming. In this paper, we address a new problem of active learning with expert advice, where the outcome of an instance is disclosed only when it is requested by the online learner. Our goal is to learn an accurate prediction model by asking the oracle the number of questions as small as possible. To address this challenge, we propose a framework of active forecasters for online active learning with expert advice, which attempts to extend two regular forecasters, i.e., Exponentially Weighted Average Forecaster and Greedy Forecaster, to tackle the task of active learning with expert advice. We prove that the proposed algorithms satisfy the Hannan consistency under some proper assumptions, and validate the efficacy of our technique by an extensive set of experiments.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2013

A survey on online active learning

Online active learning is a paradigm in machine learning that aims to select the most informative data points to label from a data stream. The problem of minimizing the cost associated with collecting labeled observations has gained a lot of attention in recent years, particularly in real-world applications where data is only available in an unlabeled form. Annotating each observation can be time-consuming and costly, making it difficult to obtain large amounts of labeled data. To overcome this issue, many active learning strategies have been proposed in the last decades, aiming to select the most informative observations for labeling in order to improve the performance of machine learning models. These approaches can be broadly divided into two categories: static pool-based and stream-based active learning. Pool-based active learning involves selecting a subset of observations from a closed pool of unlabeled data, and it has been the focus of many surveys and literature reviews. However, the growing availability of data streams has led to an increase in the number of approaches that focus on online active learning, which involves continuously selecting and labeling observations as they arrive in a stream. This work aims to provide an overview of the most recently proposed approaches for selecting the most informative observations from data streams in the context of online active learning. We review the various techniques that have been proposed and discuss their strengths and limitations, as well as the challenges and opportunities that exist in this area of research. Our review aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the field and to highlight directions for future work