Active Learning with Expert Advice

Conventional learning with expert advice methods assumes a learner is always receiving the outcome (e.g., class labels) of every incoming training instance at the end of each trial. In real applications, acquiring the outcome from oracle can be costly or time consuming. In this paper, we address a new problem of active learning with expert advice, where the outcome of an instance is disclosed only when it is requested by the online learner. Our goal is to learn an accurate prediction model by asking the oracle the number of questions as small as possible. To address this challenge, we propose a framework of active forecasters for online active learning with expert advice, which attempts to extend two regular forecasters, i.e., Exponentially Weighted Average Forecaster and Greedy Forecaster, to tackle the task of active learning with expert advice. We prove that the proposed algorithms satisfy the Hannan consistency under some proper assumptions, and validate the efficacy of our technique by an extensive set of experiments.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2013

Fast Load Control with Stochastic Frequency Measurement

Matching demand with supply and regulating frequency are key issues in power system operations. Flexibility and local frequency measurement capability of loads offer new regulation mechanisms through load control. We present a frequency-based fast load control scheme which aims to match total demand with supply while minimizing the global end-use disutility. Local frequency measurement enables loads to make decentralized decisions on their power from the estimates of total demand-supply mismatch. To resolve the errors in such estimates caused by stochastic frequency measurement errors, loads communicate via a neighborhood area network. Case studies show that the proposed load control can balance demand with supply and restore the frequency at the timescale faster than AGC, even when the loads use a highly simplified system model in their algorithms. Moreover, we discuss the tradeoff between communication and performance, and show with experiments that a moderate amount of communication significantly improves the performance

Swing Dynamics as Primal-Dual Algorithm for Optimal Load Control

Frequency regulation and generation-load balancing are key issues in power transmission networks. Complementary to generation control, loads provide flexible and fast responsive sources for frequency regulation, and local frequency measurement capability of loads offers the opportunity of decentralized control. In this paper, we propose an optimal load control problem, which balances the load reduction (or increase) with the generation shortfall (or surplus), resynchronizes the bus frequencies, and minimizes a measure of aggregate disutility of participation in such a load control. We find that, a frequency-based load control coupled with the dynamics of swing equations and branch power flows serve as a distributed primal-dual algorithm to solve the optimal load control problem and its dual. Simulation shows that the proposed mechanism can restore frequency, balance load with generation and achieve the optimum of the load control problem within several seconds after a disturbance in generation. Through simulation, we also compare the performance of optimal load control with automatic generation control (AGC), and discuss the effect of their incorporation