Human-in-the-Loop

Interactive machine learning for health informatics: when do we need the human-in-the-loop?

Machine learning (ML) is the fastest growing field in computer science, and health informatics is among the greatest challenges. The goal of ML is to develop algorithms which can learn and improve over time and can be used for predictions. Most ML researchers concentrate on automatic machine learning (aML), where great advances have been made, for example, in speech recognition, recommender systems, or autonomous vehicles. Automatic approaches greatly benefit from big data with many training sets. However, in the health domain, sometimes we are confronted with a small number of data sets or rare events, where aML-approaches suffer of insufficient training samples. Here interactive machine learning (iML) may be of help, having its roots in reinforcement learning, preference learning, and active learning. The term iML is not yet well used, so we define it as “algorithms that can interact with agents and can optimize their learning behavior through these interactions, where the agents can also be human.” This “human-in-the-loop” can be beneficial in solving computationally hard problems, e.g., subspace clustering, protein folding, or k-anonymization of health data, where human expertise can help to reduce an exponential search space through heuristic selection of samples. Therefore, what would otherwise be an NP-hard problem, reduces greatly in complexity through the input and the assistance of a human agent involved in the learning phase. Most of all the human in the loop can bring in conceptual knowledge, “intuition”, expertise and explicit knowledge which current AI is completely lacking!

We define iML-approaches as algorithms that can interact with both computational agents and human agents *) and can optimize their learning behavior through these interactions.

*) In active learning such agents are referred to as the so-called “oracles”

From black-box to glass-box: where is the human-in-the-loop?

The first question we have to answer is: “What is the difference between the iML-approach to the aML-approach, i.e., unsupervised learning, supervised, or semi-supervised learning?”

Scenario D – see slide below – shows the iML-approach, where the human expert is seen as an agent directly involved in the actual learning phase, step-by-step influencing measures such as distance, cost functions, etc.

Obvious concerns may emerge immediately and one can argue: what about the robustness of this approach, the subjectivity, the transfer of the (human) agents; many questions remain open and are subject for future research, particularly in evaluation, replicability, robustness, etc.

Read full article here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40708-016-0042-6/fulltext.html
https://www.mendeley.com/catalog/interactive-machine-learning-health-informatics-we-need-humanintheloop