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We study the problem of combining active learning suggestions to identify informative training examples by empirically comparing methods on benchmark datasets. Many active learning heuristics for classification problems have been proposed to help us pick which instance to annotate next. But what is the optimal heuristic for a particular source of data? Motivated by the success of methods that combine predictors, we combine active learners with bandit algorithms and rank aggregation methods. We demonstrate that a combination of active learners outperforms passive learning in large benchmark datasets and removes the need to pick a particular active learner a priori. We discuss challenges to finding good rewards for bandit approaches and show that rank aggregation performs well.

We study the problem of combining active learning suggestions to identify informative training examples by empirically comparing methods on benchmark datasets. Many active learning heuristics for classification problems have been proposed to help us pick which instance to annotate next. But what is the optimal heuristic for a particular source of data? Motivated by the success of methods that combine predictors, we combine active learners with bandit algorithms and rank aggregation methods. We demonstrate that a combination of active learners outperforms passive learning in large benchmark datasets and removes the need to pick a particular active learner a priori. We discuss challenges to finding good rewards for bandit approaches and show that rank aggregation performs well., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests., (© 2018 Tran et al.)