Feature selection for co-training

Abstract

Co-training is a semi-supervised learning method, which employs two complementary learners to label the unlabeled data for each other and to predict the test sample together. Previous studies show that redundant information can help improve the ratio of prediction accuracy between semi-supervised learning methods and supervised learning methods. However, redundant information often practically hurts the performance of learning machines. This paper investigates what redundant features have effect on the semi-supervised learning methods, e.g. co-training, and how to remove the redundant features as well as the irrelevant features. Here, FESCOT (feature selection for co-training) is proposed to improve the generalization performance of co-training with feature selection. Experimental results on artificial and real world data sets show that FESCOT helps to remove irrelevant and redundant features that hurt the performance of the co-training method.