AutoDAL: Distributed Active Learning with Automatic Hyperparameter Selection

Automated machine learning (AutoML) strives to establish an appropriate machine learning model for any dataset automatically with minimal human intervention. Although extensive research has been conducted on AutoML, most of it has focused on supervised learning. Research of automated semi-supervised learning and active learning algorithms is still limited. Implementation becomes more challenging when the algorithm is designed for a distributed computing environment. With this as motivation, we propose a novel automated learning system for distributed active learning (AutoDAL) to address these challenges. First, automated graph-based semi-supervised learning is conducted by aggregating the proposed cost functions from different compute nodes in a distributed manner. Subsequently, automated active learning is addressed by jointly optimizing hyperparameters in both the classification and query selection stages leveraging the graph loss minimization and entropy regularization. Moreover, we propose an efficient distributed active learning algorithm which is scalable for big data by first partitioning the unlabeled data and replicating the labeled data to different worker nodes in the classification stage, and then aggregating the data in the controller in the query selection stage. The proposed AutoDAL algorithm is applied to multiple benchmark datasets and a real-world electrocardiogram (ECG) dataset for classification. We demonstrate that the proposed AutoDAL algorithm is capable of achieving significantly better performance compared to several state-of-the-art AutoML approaches and active learning algorithms.