Learning with Teacher - Learning Using Hidden Information

Series
Other Talks
Time
Friday, January 16, 2009 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Klaus 2447
Speaker
Vladimir Vapnik – NEC Laboratories, Columbia University and Royal Holloway University of London
Organizer
Yuri Bakhtin

Please Note: You are cordially invited to attend a reception that will follow the seminar to chat informally with faculty and students. Refreshments will be provided.

The existing machine learning paradigm considers a simple scheme: given a set of training examples find in a given collection of functions the one that in the best possible way approximates the unknown decision rule. In such a paradigm a teacher does not play an important role. In human learning, however, the role of a teacher is very important: along with examples a teacher provides students with explanations, comments, comparisons, and so on. In this talk I will introduce elements of human teaching in machine learning. I will consider an advanced learning paradigm called learning using hidden information (LUHI), where at the training stage a teacher gives some additional information x^* about training example x. This information will not be available at the test stage. I will consider the LUHI paradigm for support vector machine type of algorithms, demonstrate its superiority over the classical one and discuss general questions related to this paradigm. For details see FODAVA, Foundations of Data Analysis and Visual Analytics