Semi-Supervised Learning on Single-View Datasets by Integration of Multiple Co-trained Classifiers

We propose a novel semi-supervised learning algorithm, called IMCC, designed for co-training classifiers on single-view datasets. Our method runs the co-training algorithm for a predefined number of times, each time using a different random split of features. Thus, a set of diverse co-training classifiers is created. Each of these classifiers then labels each of the examples for which we want to determine the class label. In this way, each example for classification is assigned multiple labels. We then treat this as a problem of learning from inconsistent and unreliable annotators in a multi-annotator problem setting and estimate the single hidden true label for each example. In experimental results obtained on 25 benchmark datasets of various properties IMCC outperformed five considered alternative methods for co-training on single-view datasets, and resulted in a statistical tie with a Naive Bayes classifier trained using a much larger set of labeled examples.