Instance selection method for improving graph-based semi-supervised learning

Abstract

Graph-based semi-supervised learning is an important semi-supervised learning paradigm. Although graph-based semi-supervised learning methods have been shown to be helpful in various situations, they may adversely affect performance when using unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a new graph-based semi-supervised learning method based on instance selection in order to reduce the chances of performance degeneration. Our basic idea is that given a set of unlabeled instances, it is not the best approach to exploit all the unlabeled instances; instead, we should exploit the unlabeled instances that are highly likely to help improve the performance, while not taking into account the ones with high risk. We develop both transductive and inductive variants of our method. Experiments on a broad range of data sets show that the chances of performance degeneration of our proposed method are much smaller than those of many state-of-the-art graph-based semi-supervised learning methods.