Semi-supervised support vector classification with self-constructed Universum

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a strategy dealing with the semi-supervised classification problem, in which the support vector machine with self-constructed Universum is iteratively solved. Universum data, which do not belong to either class of interest, have been illustrated to encode some prior knowledge by representing meaningful concepts in the same domain as the problem at hand. Our new method is applied to seek more reliable positive and negative examples from the unlabeled dataset step by step, and the Universum support vector machine(U-SVM) is used iteratively. Different Universum data will result in different performance, so several effective approaches are explored to construct Universum datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that appropriately constructed Universum will improve the accuracy and reduce the number of iterations.