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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kearns, Phillip, Jedynak, Bruno, Lipor, John
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11985
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author Kearns, Phillip
Jedynak, Bruno
Lipor, John
author_facet Kearns, Phillip
Jedynak, Bruno
Lipor, John
contents We consider the problem of active learning in the context of spatial sampling for level set estimation (LSE), where the goal is to localize all regions where a function of interest lies above/below a given threshold as quickly as possible. We present a finite-horizon search procedure to perform LSE in one dimension while optimally balancing both the final estimation error and the distance traveled for a fixed number of samples. A tuning parameter is used to trade off between the estimation accuracy and distance traveled. We show that the resulting optimization problem can be solved in closed form and that the resulting policy generalizes existing approaches to this problem. We then show how this approach can be used to perform level set estimation in higher dimensions under the popular Gaussian process model. Empirical results on synthetic data indicate that as the cost of travel increases, our method's ability to treat distance nonmyopically allows it to significantly improve on the state of the art. On real air quality data, our approach achieves roughly one fifth the estimation error at less than half the cost of competing algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_11985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Finite-Horizon Approach to Active Level Set Estimation
Kearns, Phillip
Jedynak, Bruno
Lipor, John
Machine Learning
Robotics
We consider the problem of active learning in the context of spatial sampling for level set estimation (LSE), where the goal is to localize all regions where a function of interest lies above/below a given threshold as quickly as possible. We present a finite-horizon search procedure to perform LSE in one dimension while optimally balancing both the final estimation error and the distance traveled for a fixed number of samples. A tuning parameter is used to trade off between the estimation accuracy and distance traveled. We show that the resulting optimization problem can be solved in closed form and that the resulting policy generalizes existing approaches to this problem. We then show how this approach can be used to perform level set estimation in higher dimensions under the popular Gaussian process model. Empirical results on synthetic data indicate that as the cost of travel increases, our method's ability to treat distance nonmyopically allows it to significantly improve on the state of the art. On real air quality data, our approach achieves roughly one fifth the estimation error at less than half the cost of competing algorithms.
title A Finite-Horizon Approach to Active Level Set Estimation
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11985