A Policy for Early Sequence Classification

Abstract: Sequences are often not received in their entirety at once, but instead, received incrementally over time, element by element. Early predictions yielding a higher benefit, one aims to classify a sequence as accurately as possible, as soon as possible, without having to wait for the last element. For this early sequence classification, we introduce our novel classifier-induced stopping. While previous methods depend on exploration during training to learn when to stop and classify, ours is a more direct, supervised approach. Our classifier-induced stopping achieves an average Pareto frontier AUC increase of 11.8% over multiple experiments.