Semi-supervised Learning from General Unlabeled Data

We consider the problem of semi-supervised learning (SSL) from general unlabeled data, which may contain irrelevant samples. Within the binary setting, our model manages to better utilize the information from unlabeled data by formulating them as a three-class (-1,+1, 0) mixture, where class 0 represents the irrelevant data. This distinguishes our work from the traditional SSL problem where unlabeled data are assumed to contain relevant samples only, either +1 or -1, which are forced to be the same as the given labeled samples. This work is also different from another family of popular models, universum learning (universum means "irrelevant" data), in that the universum need not to be specified beforehand. One significant contribution of our proposed framework is that such irrelevant samples can be automatically detected from the available unlabeled data, even though they are mixed with relevant data. This hence presents a general SSL framework that does not force "clean" unlabeled data.More importantly, we formulate this general learning framework as a Semi-definite Programming problem, making it solvable in polynomial time. A series of experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can outperform the traditional SSL on both synthetic and real data.