Active Improvement of Hierarchical Object Features under Budget Constraints

When we think of an object in a supervised learning setting, we usually perceive it as a collection of fixed attribute values. Although this setting may be suited well for many classification tasks, we propose a new object representation and therewith a new challenge in data mining: an object is no longer described by one set of attributes but is represented in a hierarchy of attribute sets in different levels of quality. Obtaining a more detailed representation of an object comes with a cost. This raises the interesting question of which objects we want to enhance under a given budget and cost model. This new setting is very useful whenever resources like computing power, memory or time are limited. We propose a new Active Adaptive Algorithm (AAA) to improve objects in an iterative fashion. We demonstrate how to create a hierarchical object representation and prove the effectiveness of our new selection algorithm on these datasets.