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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Huang, Xiwen, Pinson, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20605
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author Huang, Xiwen
Pinson, Pierre
author_facet Huang, Xiwen
Pinson, Pierre
contents We introduce and analyse active learning markets as a way to purchase labels, in situations where analysts aim to acquire additional data to improve model fitting, or to better train models for predictive analytics applications. This comes in contrast to the many proposals that already exist to purchase features and examples. By originally formalising the market clearing as an optimisation problem, we integrate budget constraints and improvement thresholds into the label acquisition process. We focus on a single-buyer-multiple-seller setup and propose the use of two active learning strategies (variance based and query-by-committee based), paired with distinct pricing mechanisms. They are compared to benchmark baselines including random sampling and a greedy knapsack heuristic. The proposed strategies are validated on real-world datasets from two critical application domains: real estate pricing and energy forecasting. Results demonstrate the robustness of our approach, consistently achieving superior performance with fewer labels acquired compared to conventional methods. Our proposal comprises an easy-to-implement practical solution for optimising data acquisition in resource-constrained environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20605
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to Purchase Labels? A Cost-Effective Approach Using Active Learning Markets
Huang, Xiwen
Pinson, Pierre
Machine Learning
We introduce and analyse active learning markets as a way to purchase labels, in situations where analysts aim to acquire additional data to improve model fitting, or to better train models for predictive analytics applications. This comes in contrast to the many proposals that already exist to purchase features and examples. By originally formalising the market clearing as an optimisation problem, we integrate budget constraints and improvement thresholds into the label acquisition process. We focus on a single-buyer-multiple-seller setup and propose the use of two active learning strategies (variance based and query-by-committee based), paired with distinct pricing mechanisms. They are compared to benchmark baselines including random sampling and a greedy knapsack heuristic. The proposed strategies are validated on real-world datasets from two critical application domains: real estate pricing and energy forecasting. Results demonstrate the robustness of our approach, consistently achieving superior performance with fewer labels acquired compared to conventional methods. Our proposal comprises an easy-to-implement practical solution for optimising data acquisition in resource-constrained environments.
title How to Purchase Labels? A Cost-Effective Approach Using Active Learning Markets
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20605