On Noise Effect in Semi-supervised Learning

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of noise effect on semi-supervised learning. The goal of this article is to analyze the impact of noise on the accuracy of binary classification models created using three semi-supervised learning algorithms, namely Simple Recycled Selection, Incrementally Reinforced Selection, and Hybrid Algorithm, using Support Vector Machines to build a base classifier. Different algorithms to compute similarity matrices, namely Radial Bias Function, Cosine Similarity, and K-Nearest Neighbours were analyzed to understand their effect on model accuracy. For benchmarking purposes, datasets from the UCI repository were used. To test the noise effect, different amounts of artificially generated randomly-labeled samples were introduced into the dataset using three strategies (labeled, unlabeled, and mixed) and compared to the baseline classifier trained with the original dataset and the classifier trained on the reduced-size original dataset. The results show that the introduction of random noise into the labeled samples decreases classifier accuracy, while a moderate amount of noise in unmarked samples can have a positive effect on classifier accuracy.