Semi-supervised regression with co-training

Abstract

In many practical machine learning and data mining applications, unlabeled training examples are readily available but labeled ones are fairly expensive to obtain. Therefore, semi-supervised learning algorithms such as co-training have attracted much attention. Previous research mainly focuses on semi-supervised classification. In this paper, a co-training style semi-supervised regression algorithm, i.e. COREG, is proposed. This algorithm uses two k-nearest neighbor regressors with different distance metrics, each of which labels the unlabeled data for the other regressor where the labeling confidence is estimated through consulting the influence of the labeling of unlabeled examples on the labeled ones. Experiments show that COREG can effectively exploit unlabeled data to improve regression estimates.