Page 1 Ming Ji Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2 Information Networks: the Data Information networks  Abstraction: graphs  Data instances connected by edges representing certain relationships Examples  Telephone account networks linked by calls  user networks linked by s  Social networks linked by friendship relations  Twitter users linked by the ``follow” relation  Webpage networks interconnected by hyperlinks in the World Wide Web …

3 Active Learning: the Problem Classical task: classification of the nodes in a graph  Applications: terrorist detection, fraud detection … Why active learning  Training classification models requires labels that are often very expensive to obtain  Different labeled data will train different learners  Given an network containing millions of users, we can only sample a few users and ask experts to investigate whether they are suspicious or not, and then use the labeled data to predict which users are suspicious among all the users

4 Active Learning: the Problem Problem definition of active learning  Input: data and a classification model  Output: find out which data examples (e.g., which users) should be labeled such that the classifier could achieve higher prediction accuracy over the unlabeled data as compared to random label selection  Goal: maximize the learner's ability given a fixed budget of labeling effort.

Notations 5

Classification Model 6

The Variance Minimization Criterion 7

Experimental Results on the Co-author Network 8 # of labels2050 VM ERM Random LSC Uncertainty Classification accuracy (%) comparison

Experimental Results on the Isolet Data Set 9 Classification accuracy vs. the number of labels used

Conclusions Publication: Ming Ji and Jiawei Han, “A Variance Minimization Criterion to Active Learning on Graphs”, Proc Int. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTAT'12), La Palma, Canary Islands, April Main advantages of the novel criterion proposed  The first work to theoretically minimize the expected prediction error of a classification model on networks/graphs  The only information used: the graph structure Do not need to know any label information The data points do not need to have feature representation Future work  Test the assumptions and applicability of the criterion on real data  Study the expected error of other classification models 10