A Stopping Criterion for Transductive Active Learning

Abstract In transductive active learning, the goal is to determine the correct labels for an unlabeled, known dataset. Therefore, we can either ask an oracle to provide the right label at some cost or use the prediction of a classifier which we train on the labels acquired so far. In contrast, the commonly used (inductive) active learning aims to select instances for labeling out of the unlabeled set to create a generalized classifier, which will be deployed on unknown data. This article formally defines the transductive setting and shows that it requires new solutions. Additionally, we formalize the theoretically cost-optimal stopping point for the transductive scenario. Building upon the probabilistic active learning framework, we propose a new transductive selection strategy that includes a stopping criterion and show its superiority.