Learning from heterogeneous data based on social interactions over graphs
File(s)SML_final_version.pdf (2 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Bordignon, Virginia
Vlaski, Stefan
Matta, Vincenzo
Sayed, Ali H
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
This work proposes a decentralized architecture, where individual agents aim at solving a classification problem while observing streaming features of different dimensions and arising from possibly different distributions. In the context of social learning, several useful strategies have been developed, which solve decision making problems through local cooperation across distributed agents and allow them to learn from streaming data. However, traditional social learning strategies rely on the fundamental assumption that each agent has significant prior knowledge of the underlying distribution of the observations. In this work we overcome this issue by introducing a machine learning framework that exploits social interactions over a graph, leading to a fully data-driven solution to the distributed classification problem. In the proposed social machine learning (SML) strategy, two phases are present: in the training phase, classifiers are independently trained to generate a belief over a set of hypotheses using a finite number of training samples; in the prediction phase, classifiers evaluate streaming unlabeled observations and share their instantaneous beliefs with neighboring classifiers. We show that the SML strategy enables the agents to learn consistently under this highly-heterogeneous setting and allows the network to continue learning even during the prediction phase when it is deciding on unlabeled samples. The prediction decisions are used to continually improve performance thereafter in a manner that is markedly different from most existing static classification schemes where, following training, the decisions on unlabeled data are not re-used to improve future performance.
Date Issued
2023-05
Date Acceptance
2022-12-12
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2023, 69 (5), pp.3347-3371
ISSN
0018-9448
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Start Page
3347
End Page
3371
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
Volume
69
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/tit.2022.3232368
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2022-12-26