Active learning for classification: An optimistic approach

In this paper, we propose to reformulate the active learning problem occurring in classification as a sequential decision making problem. We particularly focus on the problem of dynamically allocating a fixed budget of samples. This raises the problem of the trade off between exploration and exploitation which is traditionally addressed in the framework of the multi-armed bandits theory. Based on previous work on bandit theory applied to active learning for regression, we introduce four novel algorithms for solving the online allocation of the budget in a classification problem. Experiments on a generic classification problem demonstrate that these new algorithms compare positively to state-of-the-art methods.