The Good, the Bad, and the Sampled: a No-Regret Approach to Safe Online Classification

Tavor Baharav, Spyros Dragazis, Aldo Pacchiano

TL;DR: We study an online logistic testing problem, where our objective is to minimize the number of queries needed while maintaining a given safety tolerance.

Abstract: We study sequential testing for a binary disease outcome when risk follows an unknown logistic model. At each round, the decision maker may either pay for a test revealing the true label or predict the outcome based on patient features and past data. The goal is to minimize costly tests while ensuring the misclassification rate stays below $\alpha$ with probability at least $1-\delta$. We propose a method that jointly estimates the logistic parameter $\theta^{\*}$ and the feature distribution, using a conservative threshold on the logistic score to decide when to test. We prove our procedure achieves the target error with high probability and requires only $\widetilde O(\sqrt{T})$ more tests than an oracle with full knowledge. This is the first no-regret guarantees for error-constrained logistic testing, with direct applications to medical screening. Simulations confirm the theory, showing efficient estimation of $\theta^{\*}$ with few excess tests.

Submission Number: 394