How to Allocate Resources For Features Acquisition?

We study classification problems where features are corrupted by noise and where the magnitude of the noise in each feature is influenced by the resources allocated to its acquisition. This is the case, for example, when multiple sensors share a common resource (power, bandwidth, attention, etc.). We develop a method for computing the optimal resource allocation for a variety of scenarios and derive theoretical bounds concerning the benefit that may arise by non-uniform allocation. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed method in simulations.

Bending the Curve: Improving the ROC Curve Through Error Redistribution

Classification performance is often not uniform over the data. Some areas in the input space are easier to classify than others. Features that hold information about the "difficulty" of the data may be non-discriminative and are therefore disregarded in the classification process. We propose a meta-learning approach where performance may be improved by post-processing. This improvement is done by establishing a dynamic threshold on the base-classifier results. Since the base-classifier is treated as a "black box" the method presented can be used on any state of the art classifier in order to try an improve its performance. We focus our attention on how to better control the true-positive/false-positive trade-off known as the ROC curve. We propose an algorithm for the derivation of optimal thresholds by redistributing the error depending on features that hold information about difficulty. We demonstrate the resulting benefit on both synthetic and real-life data.