Theoretical Foundation of Co-Training and Disagreement-Based Algorithms

Disagreement-based approaches generate multiple classifiers and exploit the disagreement among them with unlabeled data to improve learning performance. Co-training is a representative paradigm of them, which trains two classifiers separately on two sufficient and redundant views; while for the applications where there is only one view, several successful variants of co-training with two different classifiers on single-view data instead of two views have been proposed. For these disagreement-based approaches, there are several important issues which still are unsolved, in this article we present theoretical analyses to address these issues, which provides a theoretical foundation of co-training and disagreement-based approaches. Keywords: machine learning, semi-supervised learning, disagreement-based learning, co-training, multi-view classification, combination 1. Introduction Learning from labeled training data is well-established in traditional machine learning, but labeling the data is time-consuming, sometimes may be very expensive since it requires human efforts. In many practical applications, unlabeled data can be obtained abundantly and cheaply.