Timezone: »

Poster
Semi-supervised Active Linear Regression
Nived Rajaraman · Fnu Devvrit · Pranjal Awasthi

Tue Nov 29 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Hall J #820
Labeled data often comes at a high cost as it may require recruiting human labelers or running costly experiments. At the same time, in many practical scenarios, one already has access to a partially labeled, potentially biased dataset that can help with the learning task at hand. Motivated by such settings, we formally initiate a study of semi-supervised active learning'' through the frame of linear regression. Here, the learner has access to a dataset $X \in \mathbb{R}^{(n_{\text{un}}+n_{\text{lab}}) \times d}$ composed of $n_{\text{un}}$ unlabeled examples that a learner can actively query, and $n_{\text{lab}}$ examples labeled a priori. Denoting the true labels by $Y \in \mathbb{R}^{n_{\text{un}} + n_{\text{lab}}}$, the learner's objective is to find $\widehat{\beta} \in \mathbb{R}^d$ such that,$$\| X \widehat{\beta} - Y \|_2^2 \le (1 + \epsilon) \min_{\beta \in \mathbb{R}^d} \| X \beta - Y \|_2^2$$while querying the labels of as few unlabeled points as possible. In this paper, we introduce an instance dependent parameter called the reduced rank, denoted $\text{R}_X$, and propose an efficient algorithm with query complexity $O(\text{R}_X/\epsilon)$. This result directly implies improved upper bounds for two important special cases: $(i)$ active ridge regression, and $(ii)$ active kernel ridge regression, where the reduced-rank equates to the statistical dimension'', $\textsf{sd}_\lambda$ and effective dimension'', $d_\lambda$ of the problem respectively, where $\lambda \ge 0$ denotes the regularization parameter. Finally, we introduce a distributional version of the problem as a special case of the agnostic formulation we consider earlier; here, for every $X$, we prove a matching instance-wise lower bound of $\Omega (\text{R}_X / \epsilon)$ on the query complexity of any algorithm.

#### Author Information

##### Nived Rajaraman (University of California, Berkeley)

Hi I am Nived, a 2nd year PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. My research interests are broadly in high dimensional statistics. More recently I have been exploring the theory of reinforcement learning

##### Fnu Devvrit (University of Texas, Austin)

Hi. I am Devvrit, a second year PhD student at UT Austin. I'm broadly interested in large scale machine learning, deep learning, and optimization. In my free time, I play badminton and look for adventure sports.