Active Learning from Data Streams

Abstract

In this paper, we address a new research problem on active learning from data streams where data volumes grow continuously and labeling all data is considered expensive and impractical. The objective is to label a small portion of stream data from which a model is derived to predict newly arrived instances as accurate as possible. In order to tackle the challenges raised by data streams' dynamic nature, we propose a classifier ensembling based active learning framework which selectively labels instances from data streams to build an accurate classifier. A minimal variance principle is introduced to guide instance labeling from data streams. In addition, a weight updating rule is derived to ensure that our instance labeling process can adaptively adjust to dynamic drifting concepts in the data. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the performances of the proposed efforts in comparison with other simple approaches.