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Poster
Active Classification based on Value of Classifier
Tianshi Gao · Daphne Koller

Wed Dec 14 08:45 AM -- 02:59 PM (PST) @

Modern classification tasks usually involve many class labels and can be informed by a broad range of features. Many of these tasks are tackled by constructing a set of classifiers, which are then applied at test time and then pieced together in a fixed procedure determined in advance or at training time. We present an active classification process at the test time, where each classifier in a large ensemble is viewed as a potential observation that might inform our classification process. Observations are then selected dynamically based on previous observations, using a value-theoretic computation that balances an estimate of the expected classification gain from each observation as well as its computational cost. The expected classification gain is computed using a probabilistic model that uses the outcome from previous observations. This active classification process is applied at test time for each individual test instance, resulting in an efficient instance-specific decision path. We demonstrate the benefit of the active scheme on various real-world datasets, and show that it can achieve comparable or even higher classification accuracy at a fraction of the computational costs of traditional methods.

Author Information

Tianshi Gao (Facebook)
Daphne Koller (insitro)

Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and the co-founder and co-CEO of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with the best universities to connect anyone around the world with the best education, for free. Coursera is the leading MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) platform, and has partnered with dozens of the world’s top universities to offer hundreds of courses in a broad range of disciplines to millions of students, spanning every country in the world. In her research life, she works in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to systems biology and personalized medicine. She is the author of over 200 refereed publications in venues that span a range of disciplines, and has given over 15 keynote talks at major conferences. She is the recipient of many awards, which include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACM/Infosys award, and membership in the US National Academy of Engineering. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.

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