A two-stage clustering-based cold-start method for active learning

He D, Yu H, Wang G, et al. A two-stage clustering-based cold-start method for active learning[J]. Intelligent Data Analysis, 2021, 25(5): 1169-1185.

Abstract: The problem of initialization of active learning is considered in this paper. Especially, this paper studies the problem in an imbalanced data scenario, which is called as class-imbalance active learning cold-start. The novel method is two-stage clustering-based active learning cold-start (ALCS). In the first stage, to separate the instances of minority class from that of majority class, a multi-center clustering is constructed based on a new inter-cluster tightness measure, thus the data is grouped into multiple clusters. Then, in the second stage, the initial training instances are selected from each cluster based on an adaptive candidate representative instances determination mechanism and a clusters-cyclic instance query mechanism. The comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method from the aspects of class coverage, classification performance, and impact on active learning.

Keywords: Active learning, imbalanced data, initial training set, clustering