Deformed Graph Laplacian for Semisupervised Learning

Graph Laplacian has been widely exploited in traditional graph-based semisupervised learning (SSL) algorithms to regulate the labels of examples that vary smoothly on the graph. Although it achieves a promising performance in both transductive and inductive learning, it is not effective for handling ambiguous examples (shown in Fig. 1). This paper introduces deformed graph Laplacian (DGL) and presents label prediction via DGL (LPDGL) for SSL. The local smoothness term used in LPDGL, which regularizes examples and their neighbors locally, is able to improve classification accuracy by properly dealing with ambiguous examples. Theoretical studies reveal that LPDGL obtains the globally optimal decision function, and the free parameters are easy to tune. The generalization bound is derived based on the robustness analysis. Experiments on a variety of real-world data sets demonstrate that LPDGL achieves top-level performance on both transductive and inductive settings by comparing it with popular SSL algorithms, such as harmonic functions, AnchorGraph regularization, linear neighborhood propagation, Laplacian regularized least square, and Laplacian support vector machine.