Semi-Supervised Learning for Predicting Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease of the central nervous system with a propensity to inflict severe neurological disability. Accurate and early prediction of MS progression is extremely crucial for its management and treatment. Methods: In this paper, we compare a number of self-labeled semi-supervised learning methods used to predict MS from labeled and unlabeled medical data. Specifically, we compare the performance of Self-Training, SETRED, Co-Training, Co-Training by Committee, Democratic Co-Learning, RASCO, RelRASCO, CoForest, and TriTraining in different labeled ratios. The data contain clinical, imaging, and demographic features, allowing for a detailed comparison of each method’s predictive ability. Results and Conclusions: The experimental results demonstrate that several self-labeling semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms perform competitively in the task of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) prediction, even when trained on as little as 30–40% of the labeled data. Notably, Co-Training by Committee, CoForest, and TriTraining consistently deliver high performance across all metrics (accuracy, F1-score, and MCC).