Active Classification With Uncertainty Comparison Queries

Noisy pairwise comparison feedback has been incorporated to improve the overall query complexity of interactively learning binary classifiers. The positivity comparison oracle is extensively used to provide feedback on which is more likely to be positive in a pair of data points. Because it is impossible to determine accurate labels using this oracle alone without knowing the classification threshold, existing methods still rely on the traditional explicit labeling oracle, which explicitly answers the label given a data point. The current method conducts sorting on all data points and uses explicit labeling oracle to find the classification threshold. However, it has two drawbacks: (1) it needs unnecessary sorting for label inference and (2) it naively adapts quick sort to noisy feedback. In order to avoid these inefficiencies and acquire information of the classification threshold at the same time, we propose a new pairwise comparison oracle concerning uncertainties. This oracle answers which one has higher uncertainty given a pair of data points. We then propose an efficient adaptive labeling algorithm to take advantage of the proposed oracle. In addition, we address the situation where the labeling budget is insufficient compared to the data set size. Furthermore, we confirm the feasibility of the proposed oracle and the performance of the proposed algorithm theoretically and empirically.