Batch Mode Active Learning for Regression With Expected Model Change.

While active learning (AL) has been widely studied for classification problems, limited efforts have been done on AL for regression. In this paper, we introduce a new AL framework for regression, expected model change maximization (EMCM), which aims at choosing the unlabeled data instances that result in the maximum change of the current model once labeled. The model change is quantified as the difference between the current model parameters and the updated parameters after the inclusion of the newly selected examples. In light of the stochastic gradient descent learning rule, we approximate the change as the gradient of the loss function with respect to each single candidate instance. Under the EMCM framework, we propose novel AL algorithms for the linear and nonlinear regression models. In addition, by simulating the behavior of the sequential AL policy when applied for k iterations, we further extend the algorithms to batch mode AL to simultaneously choose a set of k most informative instances at each query time. Extensive experimental results on both UCI and StatLib benchmark data sets have demonstrated that the proposed algorithms are highly effective and efficient.