Active learning with c-certainty

Abstract

It is well known that the noise in labels deteriorates the performance of active learning. To reduce the noise, works on multiple oracles have been proposed. However, there is still no way to guarantee the label quality. In addition, most previous works assume that the noise level of oracles is evenly distributed or example-independent which may not be realistic. In this paper, we propose a novel active learning paradigm in which oracles can return both labels and confidences. Under this paradigm, we then propose a new and effective active learning strategy that can guarantee the quality of labels by querying multiple oracles. Furthermore, we remove the assumptions of the previous works mentioned above, and design a novel algorithm that is able to select the best oracles to query. Our empirical study shows that the new algorithm is robust, and it performs well with given different types of oracles. As far as we know, this is the first work that proposes this new active learning paradigm and an active learning algorithm in which label quality is guaranteed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.