  In this paper, we suggest a novel data-driven approach to active learning
(AL). The key idea is to train a regressor that predicts the expected error
reduction for a candidate sample in a particular learning state. By formulating
the query selection procedure as a regression problem we are not restricted to
working with existing AL heuristics; instead, we learn strategies based on
experience from previous AL outcomes. We show that a strategy can be learnt
either from simple synthetic 2D datasets or from a subset of domain-specific
data. Our method yields strategies that work well on real data from a wide
range of domains.
