Active learning for binary classification with variable selection
Modern computing and communication technologies can make data collection procedures very efficient. However, our ability to analyze large data sets and/or to extract information out from them is hard-pressed to keep up with our capacities for data collection. Among these huge data sets, some of them are not collected for any particular research purpose. For a classification problem, this means that the essential label information may not be readily obtainable, in the data set in hands, and an extra labeling procedure is required such that we can have enough label information to be used for constructing a classification model. When the size of a data set is huge, to label each subject in it will cost a lot in both capital and time. Thus, it is an important issue to decide which subjects should be labeled first in order to efficiently reduce the training cost/time. Active learning method is a promising outlet for this situation, because with the active learning ideas, we can select the unlabeled subjects sequentially without knowing their label information. In addition, there will be no confirmed information about the essential variables for constructing an efficient classification rule. Thus, how to merge a variable selection scheme with an active learning procedure is of interest. In this paper, we propose a procedure for building binary classification models when the complete label information is not available in the beginning of the training stage. We study an model-based active learning procedure with sequential variable selection schemes, and discuss the results of the proposed procedure from both theoretical and numerical aspects.