Using Deep Active Learning to Save Sensing Cost When Estimating Overall Air Quality

Abstract

Air quality is widely concerned by the governments and people. To save cost, air quality monitoring stations are deployed at only a few locations, and the stations are actuated at partial time. Therefore, it is necessary to study how to actively collect a subset of air quality data to maximize the estimation accuracy of air quality at other locations and time. In order to solve this challenge, we propose the active variational adversarial model (AVAM) that selects the most valuable unlabeled samples through two iterative phases of active learning. In the first phase of our model, a candidate set with unlabeled samples is selected through traditional active learning. In the second phase, variational auto-encoder (VAE) is used to obtain the compressed representation of the candidate set and the training set with labeled samples, then a discriminator based on three-layer neural network is trained from the compressed representation. Finally the discriminator can output the most valuable unlabeled samples from the candidate set. The experimental results show that the AVAM proposed in this paper is superior to active learning models with the first or second phase only.