Robust Importance Sampling for Error Estimation in the Context of Optimal Bayesian Transfer Learning
Classification has been a major task for building intelligent systems as it enables decision-making under uncertainty. Classifier design aims at building models from training data for representing feature-label distributions--either explicitly or implicitly. In many scientific or clinical settings, training data are typically limited, which makes designing accurate classifiers and evaluating their classification error extremely challenging. While transfer learning (TL) can alleviate this issue by incorporating data from relevant source domains to improve learning in a different target domain, it has received little attention for performance assessment, notably in error estimation. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating knowledge transferability in the context of classification error estimation within a Bayesian paradigm. We introduce a novel class of Bayesian minimum mean-square error (MMSE) estimators for optimal Bayesian transfer learning (OBTL), which enables rigorous evaluation of classification error under uncertainty in a small-sample setting. Using Monte Carlo importance sampling, we employ the proposed estimator to evaluate the classification accuracy of a broad family of classifiers that span diverse learning capabilities. Experimental results based on both synthetic data as well as real-world RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data show that our proposed OBTL error estimation scheme clearly outperforms standard error estimators, especially in a small-sample setting, by tapping into the data from other relevant domains.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
ClassificationDecision MakingDecision Making Under UncertaintyTransfer LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Low Variance Off-policy Evaluation with State-based Importance Sampling
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated ba…
Density Ratio EstimationOff-policy evaluationProvable benefits of annealing for estimating normalizing constants: Importance Sampling, Noise-Contrastive Estimation, and beyond
Recent research has developed several Monte Carlo methods for estimating the normalization constant (partition function) based on the idea of annealing. This means sampling successively from a path of distributions which…
Correcting sampling biases via importance reweighting for spatial modeling
In machine learning models, the estimation of errors is often complex due to distribution bias, particularly in spatial data such as those found in environmental studies. We introduce an approach based on the ideas of im…
Density EstimationNormalizing Constant Estimation with Gaussianized Bridge Sampling
Normalizing constant (also called partition function, Bayesian evidence, or marginal likelihood) is one of the central goals of Bayesian inference, yet most of the existing methods are both expensive and inaccurate. Here…
Bayesian InferenceMultiple Importance Sampling for Stochastic Gradient Estimation
We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framew…