Patent ID: 7551784

Claim:
A system for providing continuous inference for sequence data, comprising a processor, wherein the processor comprises the following executable instructions: an estimation component that estimates an amount of uncertainty in a prediction of a label for a sequence data observation, the estimation component utilizes subsequent sequence data observations to re-evaluate the amount of uncertainty as each observation is received; a delay component that monitors an amount of delay since receiving an initial sequence data observation; and a determination component that employs an algorithm that dynamically selects and outputs a label for the sequence data observations when the amount of uncertainty and the amount of delay is within a threshold, the threshold determined by finding an output time t that minimizes the function M(t,t 0 |o)+λ·(t−t 0 ), where t 0 is the time of a first sequence data observation, M(t,t 0 |o) is a measure of residual uncertainty in the label at time step t 0 given observations o, and λ is a tunable parameter that indicates a preferred balance between label output delay and label confidence.