  We study agnostic active learning, where the goal is to learn a classifier in
a pre-specified hypothesis class interactively with as few label queries as
possible, while making no assumptions on the true function generating the
labels. The main algorithms for this problem are {\em{disagreement-based active
learning}}, which has a high label requirement, and {\em{margin-based active
learning}}, which only applies to fairly restricted settings. A major challenge
is to find an algorithm which achieves better label complexity, is consistent
in an agnostic setting, and applies to general classification problems.
  In this paper, we provide such an algorithm. Our solution is based on two
novel contributions -- a reduction from consistent active learning to
confidence-rated prediction with guaranteed error, and a novel confidence-rated
predictor.
