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An Adaptive Pre-filtering Technique for Error-Reduction Sampling in Active Learning

Error-reduction sampling (ERS) is a high performing (but computationally expensive) query selection strategy for active learning. Subset optimisation has been proposed to reduce computational expense by applying ERS to only a subset of examples from the pool. This paper compares techniques used to construct the subset, namely random sub-sampling and pre-filtering. We focus on pre-filtering which populates the subset with more informative examples by filtering from the unlabelled pool using a query selection strategy. In this paper we establish whether pre-filtering outperforms sub-sampling optimisation, examine the effect of subset size, and propose a novel adaptive pre-filtering technique which dynamically switches between several alternative pre-filtering techniques using a multi-armed bandit algorithm. Empirical evaluations conducted on two benchmark text categorisation datasets demonstrate that pre-filtered ERS achieve higher levels of accuracy when compared to sub-sampled ERS. The proposed adaptive pre-filtering technique is also shown to be competitive with the optimal pre-filtering technique on the majority of problems and is never the worst technique.