FIESTA: Fast IdEntification of State-of-The-Art models using adaptive bandit algorithms

Henry Moss, Andrew Moore, David Leslie, Paul Rayson


Abstract
We present FIESTA, a model selection approach that significantly reduces the computational resources required to reliably identify state-of-the-art performance from large collections of candidate models. Despite being known to produce unreliable comparisons, it is still common practice to compare model evaluations based on single choices of random seeds. We show that reliable model selection also requires evaluations based on multiple train-test splits (contrary to common practice in many shared tasks). Using bandit theory from the statistics literature, we are able to adaptively determine appropriate numbers of data splits and random seeds used to evaluate each model, focusing computational resources on the evaluation of promising models whilst avoiding wasting evaluations on models with lower performance. Furthermore, our user-friendly Python implementation produces confidence guarantees of correctly selecting the optimal model. We evaluate our algorithms by selecting between 8 target-dependent sentiment analysis methods using dramatically fewer model evaluations than current model selection approaches.
Anthology ID:
P19-1281
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2920–2930
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1281
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1281
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Henry Moss, Andrew Moore, David Leslie, and Paul Rayson. 2019. FIESTA: Fast IdEntification of State-of-The-Art models using adaptive bandit algorithms. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2920–2930, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FIESTA: Fast IdEntification of State-of-The-Art models using adaptive bandit algorithms (Moss et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1281.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P19-1281.mp4
Code
 apmoore1/fiesta