An Inductive Framework for Semi-supervised Learning (Discussion Paper)

Semi-supervised learning is crucial in many applications where accessing class labels is unaffordable or costly. The most promising approaches are graph-based but they are transductive and they do not provide a generalized model working on inductive scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a generic framework for inductive semi-supervised learning based on three components: an ensemble of semi-supervised autoencoders providing a new data representation that leverages the knowledge supplied by the reduced amount of available labels; a graph-based step that helps augmenting the training set with pseudo-labeled instances and, finally, a classifier trained with labeled and pseudo-labeled instances. The experimental results show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art inductive semi-supervised methods.