Active learning of Gaussian processes with manifold-preserving graph reduction

As a recently proposed machine learning method, active learning of Gaussian processes can effectively use a small number of labeled examples to train a classifier, which in turn is used to select the most informative examples from unlabeled data for manual labeling. However, in the process of example selection, active learning usually need consider all the unlabeled data without exploiting the structural space connectivity among them. This will decrease the classification accuracy to some extent since the selected points may not be the most informative. To overcome this shortcoming, in this paper, we present a method which applies the manifold-preserving graph reduction (MPGR) algorithm to the traditional active learning method of Gaussian processes. MPGR is a simple and efficient example sparsification algorithm which can construct a subset to represent the global structure and simultaneously eliminate the influence of noisy points and outliers. Thereby, when actively selecting examples to label, we just choose from the subset constructed by MPGR instead of the whole unlabeled data. We report experimental results on multiple data sets which demonstrate that our method obtains better classification performance compared with the original active learning method of Gaussian processes.