A Survey of Semi-Supervised Learning Methods

In traditional machine learning approaches to classification, one uses only a labelled set to train the classifier. Labelled instances however are often difficult, expensive, or time consuming to obtain, as they require the efforts of experienced human annotators. Meanwhile unlabeled data may be relatively easy to collect, but there has been few ways to use them. Semi-supervised learning addresses this problem by using large amount of unlabeled data, together with the labelled data, to build better classifiers. Because semi-supervised learning requires less human effort and gives higher accuracy, it is of great interest both in theory and in practice. The paper discusses various important approaches to semi-supervised learning such as self-training, co-training(CO), expectation maximization (EM), CO-EM, Then how graph-based methods are useful is explained. All semi-supervised learning methods are classified into generative and discriminative methods. But experimental results show that the hybrid algorithm gives better classification accuracy.