Progressive Label Propagation for Semi-Supervised Multi-Dimensional Classification

Abstract

In multi-dimensional classification (MDC), each training example is associated with multiple class variables from different class spaces. However, it is rather costly to collect labeled MDC examples which have to be annotated from several dimensions (class spaces). To reduce the labeling cost, we attempt to deal with the MDC problem under the semi-supervised learning setting. Accordingly, a novel MDC approach named PLAP is proposed to solve the resulting semi-supervised MDC problem. Overall, PLAP works under the label propagation framework to utilize unlabeled data. To further consider dependencies among class spaces, PLAP deals with each class space in a progressive manner, where the previous propagation results will be used to initialize the current propagation procedure and all processed class spaces and the current one will be regarded as an entirety. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.