A Comparative Evaluation of Curriculum Learning with Filtering and Boosting

Not all instances in a data set are equally beneficial for inferring a model of the data. Some instances (such as outliers) are detrimental to inferring a model of the data. Several machine learning techniques treat instances in a data set differently during training such as curriculum learning, filtering, and boosting. However, an automated method for determining how beneficial an instance is for inferring a model of the data does not exist. In this paper, we present an automated method that orders the instances in a data set by complexity based on the their likelihood of being misclassified (instance hardness). The underlying assumption of this method is that instances with a high likelihood of being misclassified represent more complex concepts in a data set. Ordering the instances in a data set allows a learning algorithm to focus on the most beneficial instances and ignore the detrimental ones. We compare ordering the instances in a data set in curriculum learning, filtering and boosting. We find that ordering the instances significantly increases classification accuracy and that filtering has the largest impact on classification accuracy. On a set of 52 data sets, ordering the instances increases the average accuracy from 81% to 84%.