A semilabeled-sample-driven bagging technique for ill-posed classification problems

In this letter, a semilabeled-sample-driven bootstrap aggregating (bagging) technique based on a co-inference (inductive and transductive) framework is proposed for addressing ill-posed classification problems. The novelties of the proposed technique lie in: 1) the definition of a general classification strategy for ill-posed problems by the joint use of training and semilabeled samples (i.e., original unlabeled samples labeled by the classification process); and 2) the design of an effective bagging method (driven by semilabeled samples) for a proper exploitation of different classifiers based on bootstrapped hybrid training sets. Although the proposed technique is general and can be applied to any classification algorithm, in this letter multilayer perceptron neural networks (MLPs) are used to develop the basic classifier of the proposed architecture. In this context, a novel cost function for the training of MLPs is defined, which properly considers the contribution of semilabeled samples in the learning of each member of the ensemble. The experimental results, which are obtained on different ill-posed classification problems, confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.