Robust semi-supervised learning through label aggregation

Abstract

Semi-supervised learning is proposed to exploit both labeled and unlabeled data. However, as the scale of data in real world applications increases significantly, conventional semisupervised algorithms usually lead to massive computational cost and cannot be applied to large scale datasets. In addition, label noise is usually present in the practical applications due to human annotation, which very likely results in remarkable degeneration of performance in semi-supervised methods. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose an efficient RObust Semi-Supervised Ensemble Learning (ROSSEL) method, which generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled data using a set of weak annotators, and combines them to approximate the ground-truth labels to assist semisupervised learning. We formulate the weighted combination process as a multiple label kernel learning (MLKL) problem which can be solved efficiently. Compared with other semisupervised learning algorithms, the proposed method has linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm.