Active Learning for Regression with Aggregated Outputs

Due to the privacy protection or the difficulty of data collection, we cannot observe individual outputs for each instance, but we can observe aggregated outputs that are summed over multiple instances in a set in some real-world applications. To reduce the labeling cost for training regression models for such aggregated data, we propose an active learning method that sequentially selects sets to be labeled to improve the predictive performance with fewer labeled sets. For the selection measurement, the proposed method uses the mutual information, which quantifies the reduction of the uncertainty of the model parameters by observing the aggregated output. With Bayesian linear basis functions for modeling outputs given an input, which include approximated Gaussian processes and neural networks, we can efficiently calculate the mutual information in a closed form. With the experiments using various datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better predictive performance with fewer labeled sets than existing methods

Information-Theoretic Active Learning for Content-Based Image Retrieval

We propose Information-Theoretic Active Learning (ITAL), a novel batch-mode active learning method for binary classification, and apply it for acquiring meaningful user feedback in the context of content-based image retrieval. Instead of combining different heuristics such as uncertainty, diversity, or density, our method is based on maximizing the mutual information between the predicted relevance of the images and the expected user feedback regarding the selected batch. We propose suitable approximations to this computationally demanding problem and also integrate an explicit model of user behavior that accounts for possible incorrect labels and unnameable instances. Furthermore, our approach does not only take the structure of the data but also the expected model output change caused by the user feedback into account. In contrast to other methods, ITAL turns out to be highly flexible and provides state-of-the-art performance across various datasets, such as MIRFLICKR and ImageNet.Comment: GCPR 2018 paper (14 pages text + 2 pages references + 6 pages appendix

A nonparametric Bayesian approach toward robot learning by demonstration

In the past years, many authors have considered application of machine learning methodologies to effect robot learning by demonstration. Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) is one of the most successful methodologies used for this purpose. A major limitation of GMR models concerns automatic selection of the proper number of model states, i.e., the number of model component densities. Existing methods, including likelihood- or entropy-based criteria, usually tend to yield noisy model size estimates while imposing heavy computational requirements. Recently, Dirichlet process (infinite) mixture models have emerged in the cornerstone of nonparametric Bayesian statistics as promising candidates for clustering applications where the number of clusters is unknown a priori. Under this motivation, to resolve the aforementioned issues of GMR-based methods for robot learning by demonstration, in this paper we introduce a nonparametric Bayesian formulation for the GMR model, the Dirichlet process GMR model. We derive an efficient variational Bayesian inference algorithm for the proposed model, and we experimentally investigate its efficacy as a robot learning by demonstration methodology, considering a number of demanding robot learning by demonstration scenarios

Forecasting of commercial sales with large scale Gaussian Processes

This paper argues that there has not been enough discussion in the field of applications of Gaussian Process for the fast moving consumer goods industry. Yet, this technique can be important as it e.g., can provide automatic feature relevance determination and the posterior mean can unlock insights on the data. Significant challenges are the large size and high dimensionality of commercial data at a point of sale. The study reviews approaches in the Gaussian Processes modeling for large data sets, evaluates their performance on commercial sales and shows value of this type of models as a decision-making tool for management.Comment: 1o pages, 5 figure