Learning to quantify: Estimating class prevalence via supervised learning

Moreo Fernandez Ad, Sebastiani F

Text Quantification  Supervised Prevalence Estimation  Class Prior Estimation  Tutorial 

Quantification (also known as "supervised prevalence estimation", or" class prior estimation") is the task of estimating, given a set ? of unlabelled items and a set of classes C= c1,..., c| C|, the relative frequency (or" prevalence") p (ci) of each class ci C, ie, the fraction of items in ? that belong to ci. The goal of this course is to introduce the audience to the problem of quantification and to its importance, to the main supervised learning techniques that have been proposed for solving it, to the metrics used to evaluate them, and to what appear to be the most promising directions for further research.