Semisupervised learning for a hybrid generative/discriminative classifier based on the maximum entropy principle

This paper presents a method for designing semi-supervised classifiers trained on labeled and unlabeled samples. We focus on probabilistic semi-supervised classifier design for multi-class and single-labeled classification problems, and propose a hybrid approach that takes advantage of generative and discriminative approaches. In our approach, we first consider a generative model trained by using labeled samples and introduce a bias correction model, where these models belong to the same model family, but have different parameters. Then, we construct a hybrid classifier by combining these models based on the maximum entropy principle. To enable us to apply our hybrid approach to text classification problems, we employed naive Bayes models as the generative and bias correction models. Our experimental results for four text data sets confirmed that the generalization ability of our hybrid classifier was much improved by using a large number of unlabeled samples for training when there were too few labeled samples to obtain good performance. We also confirmed that our hybrid approach significantly outperformed generative and discriminative approaches when the performance of the generative and discriminative approaches was comparable. Moreover, we examined the performance of our hybrid classifier when the labeled and unlabeled data distributions were different.     

Discriminative deep belief networks for visual data classification

Visual data classification using insufficient labeled data is a well-known hard problem. Semi-supervise learning, which attempts to exploit the unlabeled data in additional to the labeled ones, has attracted much attention in recent years. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised classifier called discriminative deep belief networks (DDBN). DDBN utilizes a new deep architecture to integrate the abstraction ability of deep belief nets (DBN) and discriminative ability of backpropagation strategy. For unsupervised learning, DDBN inherits the advantage of DBN, which preserves the information well from high-dimensional features space to low-dimensional embedding. For supervised learning, through a well designed objective function, the backpropagation strategy directly optimizes the classification results in training dataset by refining the parameter space. Moreover, we apply DDBN to visual data classification task and observe an important fact that the learning ability of deep architecture is seriously underrated in real-world applications, especially in visual data analysis. The comparative experiments on standard datasets of different types and different scales demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms both representative semi-supervised classifiers and existing deep learning techniques. For visual dataset, we can further improve the DDBN performance with much larger and deeper architecture.     

基于分层高斯混合模型的半监督学习算法

提出了一种基于分层高斯混合模型的半监督学习算法，半监督学习算法的学习样本包括已标记类别样本和未标记类别学习样本。如用高斯混合模型拟合每个类别已标记学习样本的概率分布，进而用高斯数为类别数的分层高斯混合模型拟合全部(已标记和未标记)学习样本的分布，则形成为一个基于分层的高斯混合模型的半监督学习问题。基于EM算法，首先利用每个类别已标记样本学习高斯混合模型，然后以该模型参数和已标记样本的频率分布作为分层高斯混合模型参数的初值，给出了基于分层高斯混合模型的半监督学习算法，以银行票据印刷体数字识别做实验，实验结果表明，本算法能够获得较好的效果。     

Semi-supervised learning with density-ratio estimation

In this paper we study statistical properties of semi-supervised learning, which is considered to be an important problem in the field of machine learning. In standard supervised learning only labeled data is observed, and classification and regression problems are formalized as supervised learning. On the other hand, in semi-supervised learning, unlabeled data is also obtained in addition to labeled data. Hence, the ability to exploit unlabeled data is important to improve prediction accuracy in semi-supervised learning. This problem is regarded as a semiparametric estimation problem with missing data. Under discriminative probabilistic models, it was considered that unlabeled data is useless to improve the estimation accuracy. Recently, the weighted estimator using unlabeled data achieves a better prediction accuracy compared to the learning method using only labeled data, especially when the discriminative probabilistic model is misspecified. That is, improvement under the semiparametric model with missing data is possible when the semiparametric model is misspecified. In this paper, we apply the density-ratio estimator to obtain the weight function in semi-supervised learning. Our approach is advantageous because the proposed estimator does not require well-specified probabilistic models for the probability of the unlabeled data. Based on statistical asymptotic theory, we prove that the estimation accuracy of our method outperforms supervised learning using only labeled data. Some numerical experiments present the usefulness of our methods.     

基于半监督学习和支持向量机的煤与瓦斯突出预测研究

针对支持向量机要求输入向量为已标记样本,而实际应用中已标记样本很难获取的问题,提出将半监督学习和支持向量机结合的煤与瓦斯突出预测方法;介绍了采用SVM预测煤与瓦斯突出的流程及其输入向量的选择;对半监督学习中的协同训练算法进行了改进:在同一属性集上训练2个不同分类器SVM和KNN,将2个分类器标记一致的样本加入训练集,从而充分利用未标记样本不断补充信息,更新训练集标记样本,达到强化训练集的目的。测试结果表明,改进后的算法比单独的支持向量机预测方法准确率更高。     

Discriminative semi-supervised learning of dynamical systems for motion estimation

We introduce novel discriminative semi-supervised learning algorithms for dynamical systems, and apply them to the problem of 3D human motion estimation. Our recent work on discriminative learning of dynamical systems has been proven to achieve superior performance than traditional generative learning approaches. However, one of the main issues of learning the dynamical systems is to gather labeled output sequences which are typically obtained from precise motion capture tools, hence expensive. In this paper we utilize a large amount of unlabeled (input) video data to improve the prediction performance of the dynamical systems significantly. We suggest two discriminative semi-supervised learning approaches that extend the well-known algorithms in static domains to the sequential, real-valued multivariate output domains: (i) self-training which we derive as coordinate ascent optimization of a proper discriminative objective over both model parameters and the unlabeled state sequences, (ii) minimum entropy approach which maximally reduces the model's uncertainty in state prediction for unlabeled data points. These approaches are shown to achieve significant improvement against the traditional generative semi-supervised learning methods. We demonstrate the benefits of our approaches on the 3D human motion estimation problems.     

Visual tracking with semi-supervised online weighted multiple instance learning

Adaptive discriminative tracking is a new research topic that has attracted broad attention due to its extensive application value. To take full advantage of the information about targets and their surrounding background, we propose a novel single object tracking-by-detection tracker in this paper, combining semi-supervised learning, multiple instance learning and the Bayesian theorem. The tracker uses a block-based inconsistency function of the labeled and unlabeled training samples in the selection of optimal weak classifiers during the parameter updating phase of each frame. Experimental results showed that the proposed tracker has excellent performance over other eight state-of-the-art trackers for thirteen open-access video sequences.     

基于半监督聚类方法的测试用例选择技术

回归测试的目的是保证软件修改后没有引入新的错误。但是随着软件的演化,回归测试用例集不断增大,为了控制成本,回归测试用例选择技术应运而生。近年来,聚类分析技术被运用到回归测试用例选择问题中。将半监督学习引入到聚类技术中,提出了判别型半监督K-means聚类方法(Discriminative Semi-supervised K-means clustering Method,DSKM)。该方法从回归测试的历史执行记录中挖掘出隐藏的成对约束信息,同时利用大量的无标签样本和少量的有标签样本进行学习,优化聚类的结果,并进一步优化测试用例选择的结果。实验表明,相对于Constrained-Kmeans方法和SSKM方法,DSKM方法能够更好地提高约简率并保持覆盖率。     

结合半监督与主动学习的时间序列PU问题分类

目前基于PU问题的时间序列分类常采用半监督学习对未标注数据集[U]中数据进行自动标注并构建分类器,但在这种方法中,边界数据样本类别的自动标注难以保证正确性,从而导致构建分类器的效果不佳。针对以上问题,提出一种采用主动学习对未标注数据集[U]中数据进行人工标注从而构建分类器的方法OAL（Only Active Learning）,基于投票委员会（QBC）对标注数据集构建多个分类器进行投票,以计算未标注数据样本的类别不一致性,并综合考虑数据样本的分布密度,计算数据样本的信息量,作为主动学习的数据选择策略。鉴于人工标注数据量有限,在上述OAL方法的基础上,将主动学习与半监督学习相结合,即在主动学习迭代过程中,将类别一致性高的部分数据样本自动标注,以增加训练数据中标注数据量,保证构建分类器的训练数据量。实验表明了该方法通过部分人工标注,相比半监督学习,能够为PU数据集构建更高准确率的分类器。     

Neighborhood preserving regression for image retrieval

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR), relevance feedback has been proven to be a powerful tool for bridging the gap between low level visual features and high level semantic concepts. Traditionally, relevance feedback driven CBIR is often considered as a supervised learning problem where the user provided feedbacks are used to learn a distance metric or classification function. However, CBIR is intrinsically a semi-supervised learning problem in which the testing samples (images in the database) are present during the learning process. Moreover, when there are no sufficient feedbacks, these methods may suffer from the overfitting problem. In this paper, we propose a novel neighborhood preserving regression algorithm which makes efficient use of both labeled and unlabeled images. By using the unlabeled images, the geometrical structure of the image space can be incorporated into the learning system through a regularizer. Specifically, from all the functions which minimize the empirical loss on the labeled images, we select the one which best preserves the local neighborhood structure of the image space. In this way, our method can obtain a regression function which respects both semantic and geometrical structures of the image database. We present experimental evidence suggesting that our algorithm is able to use unlabeled data effectively for image retrieval.     

Optimizing area under the ROC curve using semi-supervised learning

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is a standard methodology to evaluate the performance of a binary classification system. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) is a performance metric that summarizes how well a classifier separates two classes. Traditional AUC optimization techniques are supervised learning methods that utilize only labeled data (i.e., the true class is known for all data) to train the classifiers. In this work, inspired by semi-supervised and transductive learning, we propose two new AUC optimization algorithms hereby referred to as semi-supervised learning receiver operating characteristic (SSLROC) algorithms, which utilize unlabeled test samples in classifier training to maximize AUC. Unlabeled samples are incorporated into the AUC optimization process, and their ranking relationships to labeled positive and negative training samples are considered as optimization constraints. The introduced test samples will cause the learned decision boundary in a multi-dimensional feature space to adapt not only to the distribution of labeled training data, but also to the distribution of unlabeled test data. We formulate the semi-supervised AUC optimization problem as a semi-definite programming problem based on the margin maximization theory. The proposed methods SSLROC1 (1-norm) and SSLROC2 (2-norm) were evaluated using 34 (determined by power analysis) randomly selected datasets from the University of California, Irvine machine learning repository. Wilcoxon signed rank tests showed that the proposed methods achieved significant improvement compared with state-of-the-art methods. The proposed methods were also applied to a CT colonography dataset for colonic polyp classification and showed promising results.¹     

基于u-wordMixup的半监督深度学习模型

当标注样本匮乏时,半监督学习利用大量未标注样本解决标注瓶颈的问题,但由于未标注样本和标注样本来自不同领域,可能造成未标注样本存在质量问题,使得模型的泛化能力变差,导致分类精度下降.为此,基于wordMixup方法,提出针对未标注样本进行数据增强的u-wordMixup方法,结合一致性训练框架和Mean Teacher模型,提出一种基于u-wordMixup的半监督深度学习模型(semi-supervised deep learning model based on u-wordMixup,SD-uwM).该模型利用u-wordMixup方法对未标注样本进行数据增强,在有监督交叉熵和无监督一致性损失的约束下,能够提高未标注样本质量,减少过度拟合.在AGNews、THUCNews和20 Newsgroups数据集上的对比实验结果表明,所提出方法能够提高模型的泛化能力,同时有效提高时间性能.     

不完备弱标记数据的粗糙协同学习模型

针对不完备弱标记数据的学习问题,提出基于粗糙集理论的半监督协同学习模型.首先定义不完备弱标记数据的半监督差别矩阵,提出充分、具有差异性的约简子空间获取算法.然后在有标记数据集上利用各约简子空间训练两个基分类器.在无标记数据上,各分类器基于协同学习的思想标注信度较大的无标记样本给另一分类器学习,迭代更新直至无可利用的无标记数据.UCI数据集实验对比分析表明,文中模型可以获得更好的不完备弱标记数据的分类学习性能,具有有效性.     

基于半监督流形学习的人脸识别方法

如何有效地将流形学习(Manifold learning,ML)和半监督学习(Semi-supervised learning,SSL)方法进行结合是近年来模式识别和机器学习领域研究的热点问题.提出一种基于半监督流形学习(Semi-supervised manifold learning,SSML)的人脸识别方法,它在部分有标签信息的人脸数据的情况下,通过利用人脸数据本身的非线性流形结构信息和部分标签信息来调整点与点之间的距离形成距离矩阵,而后基于被调整的距离矩阵进行线性近邻重建来实现维数约简,提取低维鉴别特征用于人脸识别.基于公开的人脸数据库上的实验结果表明,该方法能有效地提高人脸识别的性能.     

主动协同半监督粗糙集分类模型

粗糙集理论是一种有监督学习模型,一般需要适量有标记的数据来训练分类器。但现实一些问题往往存在大量无标记的数据,而有标记数据由于标记代价过大较为稀少。文中结合主动学习和协同训练理论,提出一种可有效利用无标记数据提升分类性能的半监督粗糙集模型。该模型利用半监督属性约简算法提取两个差异性较大的约简构造基分类器,然后基于主动学习思想在无标记数据中选择两分类器分歧较大的样本进行人工标注,并将更新后的分类器交互协同学习。UCI数据集实验对比分析表明,该模型能明显提高分类学习性能,甚至能达到数据集的最优值。     

A unified framework for semi-supervised PU learning

Traditional supervised classifiers use only labeled data (features/label pairs) as the training set, while the unlabeled data is used as the testing set. In practice, it is often the case that the labeled data is hard to obtain and the unlabeled data contains the instances that belong to the predefined class but not the labeled data categories. This problem has been widely studied in recent years and the semi-supervised PU learning is an efficient solution to learn from positive and unlabeled examples. Among all the semi-supervised PU learning methods, it is hard to choose just one approach to fit all unlabeled data distribution. In this paper, a new framework is designed to integrate different semi-supervised PU learning algorithms in order to take advantage of existing methods. In essence, we propose an automatic KL-divergence learning method by utilizing the knowledge of unlabeled data distribution. Meanwhile, the experimental results show that (1) data distribution information is very helpful for the semi-supervised PU learning method; (2) the proposed framework can achieve higher precision when compared with the state-of-the-art method.     

Tri-training: exploiting unlabeled data using three classifiers

In many practical data mining applications, such as Web page classification, unlabeled training examples are readily available, but labeled ones are fairly expensive to obtain. Therefore, semi-supervised learning algorithms such as co-training have attracted much attention. In this paper, a new co-training style semi-supervised learning algorithm, named tri-training, is proposed. This algorithm generates three classifiers from the original labeled example set. These classifiers are then refined using unlabeled examples in the tri-training process. In detail, in each round of tri-training, an unlabeled example is labeled for a classifier if the other two classifiers agree on the labeling, under certain conditions. Since tri-training neither requires the instance space to be described with sufficient and redundant views nor does it put any constraints on the supervised learning algorithm, its applicability is broader than that of previous co-training style algorithms. Experiments on UCI data sets and application to the Web page classification task indicate that tri-training can effectively exploit unlabeled data to enhance the learning performance.     

Enhanced semi-supervised local Fisher discriminant analysis for face recognition

An improved manifold learning method, called enhanced semi-supervised local Fisher discriminant analysis (ESELF), for face recognition is proposed. Motivated by the fact that statistically uncorrelated and parameter-free are two desirable and promising characteristics for dimension reduction, a new difference-based optimization objective function with unlabeled samples has been designed. The proposed method preserves the manifold structure of labeled and unlabeled samples in addition to separating labeled samples in different classes from each other. The semi-supervised method has an analytic form of the globally optimal solution and it can be computed based on eigen decomposition. Experiments on synthetic data and AT&T, Yale and CMU PIE face databases are performed to test and evaluate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

最大规范化依赖性多标记半监督学习方法

针对现有多标记学习方法大多属于有监督学习方法, 而不能有效利用相对便宜且容易获得的大量未标记样本的问题, 本文提出了一种新的多标记半监督学习方法, 称为最大规范化依赖性多标记半监督学习方法(Normalized dependence maximization multi-label semi-supervised learning method). 该方法将已有标签作为约束条件,利用所有样本, 包括已标记和未标记样本,对特征集和标签集的规范化依赖性进行估计, 并以该估计值的最大化为目标, 最终通过求解带边界的迹比值问题为未标记样本打上标签. 与其他经典多标记学习方法在多个真实多标记数据集上的对比实验表明, 本文方法可以有效从已标记和未标记样本中学习, 尤其是已标记样本相对稀少时,学习效果得到了显著提高.     

Least Square Transduction Support Vector Machine

Support vector machine (SVM) is a general and powerful learning machine, which adopts supervised manner. However, for many practical machine learning and data mining applications, unlabeled training examples are readily available but labeled ones are very expensive to be obtained. Therefore, semi-supervised learning emerges as the times require. At present, the combination of SVM and semi-supervised learning principle such as transductive learning has attracted more and more attentions. Transductive support vector machine (TSVM) learns a large margin hyperplane classifier using labeled training data, but simultaneously force this hyperplane to be far away from the unlabeled data. TSVM might seem to be the perfect semi-supervised algorithm since it combines the powerful regularization of SVMs and a direct implementation of the clustering assumption, nevertheless its objective function is non-convex and then it is difficult to be optimized. This paper aims to solve this difficult problem. We apply least square support vector machine to implement TSVM, which can ensure that the objective function is convex and the optimization solution can then be easily found by solving a set of linear equations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can exploit unlabeled data to yield good performance effectively.