title: Query by transduction.
abstract: There has been recently a growing interest in the use of transductive inference for learning. We expand here the scope of transductive inference to active learning in a stream-based setting. Towards that end this paper proposes Query-by-Transduction (QBT) as a novel active learning algorithm. QBT queries the label of an example based on the p-values obtained using transduction. We show that QBT is closely related to Query-by-Committee (QBC) using relations between transduction, Bayesian statistical testing, Kullback-Leibler divergence, and Shannon information. The feasibility and utility of QBT is shown on both binary and multi-class classification tasks using SVM as the choice classifier. Our experimental results show that QBT compares favorably, in terms of mean generalization, against random sampling, committee-based active learning, margin-based active learning, and QBC in the stream-based setting.
authors.affiliation: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. sho@jpl.nasa.gov
authors.forename: Shen-Shyang
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Ho
authors.forename: Harry
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wechsler
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity