Selecting Influential Examples: Active Learning with Expected Model Output Changes

In this paper, we introduce a new general strategy for active learning. The key idea of our approach is to measure the expected change of model outputs, a concept that generalizes previous methods based on expected model change and incorporates the underlying data distribution. For each example of an unlabeled set, the expected change of model predictions is calculated and marginalized over the unknown label. This results in a score for each unlabeled example that can be used for active learning with a broad range of models and learning algorithms. In particular, we show how to derive very efficient active learning methods for Gaussian process regression, which implement this general strategy, and link them to previous methods. We analyze our algorithms and compare them to a broad range of previous active learning strategies in experiments showing that they outperform state-of-the-art on well-established benchmark datasets in the area of visual object recognition.