Human-in-the-loop construction of decision tree classifiers with parallel coordinates

Abstract

How can there be Human-In-the-Loop-Learning (HILL) if datasets aimed at building classifiers have ever more dimensions? We make two contributions. First, we examine the few early results on the effectiveness of HILL for building autonomous classifiers and report on our own experiment that validates the merits of HILL. Second, we introduce a HILL system (by using parallel coordinates) for learning of decision tree classifiers (DTCs). DTCs importantly emphasise the relevance of attributes and enable attribute selection, and therefore are appreciated for their transparency. The proposed system addresses a number of the shortcomings of the many HILL systems and allows for easy exploration of datasets. In particular, we incorporate parallel coordinates effectively in our tool for visualisation of high dimensional datasets. We can not only focus the learning on the accuracy of classifiers, but we can enhance performance in other important factors such as system's interpretability and the ability to gain insight into datasets. Finally, we show the advantages of our HILL system in the application area of mobile robotics using the case study of image segmentation in robotic soccer.