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Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning is a type of machine learning that is neither fully supervised

nor fully unsupervised. The semi-supervised learning algorithms basically fall between
supervised and unsupervised learning methods.

In semi-supervise learning, mahcine learning algorithms are trained on datasets that

contains both labeled and unlabeled data. Semi-supervised learning is generally used
when we have a huge set of unlabeled data available. In any supervised learning
algorithm, the available data has to be manually labelled which can be quite an
expensive process. In contrast, the unlabeled data used in unsupervised learning has
limited applications. Hence, semi-supervised learning algorithms were developed which
can provide a perfect balance between the two.

What is Semi-Supervised Learning?

Semi-supervised learning is a machine learning approch or technique that works in
combination of supervised and unsupervised learning. In semi-supervised learning, the
machine learning alogrithms are trained on a small amount of labeled data and a large
amount of unlabeled data.

The goal of semi-supervised learning is to develop an algorithm to divide the entire data
into different clusters and the data points closer to each other most likely share the
same output label, and then to classify the cluster into a predefined category.

We can summarize semi-supervised learning as

a machine learning approach or technique that

combines supervised learning and unsuprvised learning

to train ML models by using labeled and unlabled data

to perform classification and regreesion related tasks.

Semi-supervised Learning Vs. Supervised Learning

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The primary difference between supervised learning and semi-supervised is the dataset
that is used to train the model. In supervised learning, the model is trained on a dataset
that consists of input and each of it is paired with a predefined label i.e, the features and
their corresponding target label is provided. This allows for more accurate prediction or
classification. Whereas, in semi-supervised learning the dataset consists of a minor
amount of labeled data and a major amount of unlabeled data. The model is initially
trained on labeled data, then uses these insights to train unlabeled data to discover
additional patterns.

Semi-supervised Learning Vs. Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning trains a model only on unlabeled dataset, aiming to identify
groups with common features within the dataset. In contrast, semi-supervised learning
uses a mix of labeled data(small amount) and unlabeled data(large amount). In
unsupervised learning, the data points in the dataset are grouped into clusters based on
common features, where as semi-supervised learning is much efficient since each cluster
is allotted a pre-defined label since it train on labeled data along with unlabeled data.

When to Choose Semi-Supervised Learning?

Situations where obtaining a sufficient amount of labeled data is difficult and expensive,
but gathering unlabeled data is much easier. In such scenarios, neither fully supervised
nor unsupervised learning methods will provide accurate outcomes. This is where semi-
supervised learning methods can be implemented.

How Does Semi-Supervised Learning Work?

Semi-supervised learning generally uses small supervised learning component, i.e., small
amount of pre-labeled annotated data and large unsupervised learning component, i.e.,
lots of unlabeled data for training.

In machine learning, we can follow any of the following approaches for implementing
semi-supervised learning methods −

The first and simple approach is to build the supervised model based on a small
labeled and annotated data and then build the unsupervised model by applying
the same to the large amounts of unlabeled data to get more labeled samples.
Now, train the model on them and repeat the process.

The second approach needs some extra efforts. In this approach, we can first use
the unsupervised methods to cluster similar data samples, annotate these groups
and then use a combination of this information to train the model.

In Semi-supervised learning, the unlabeled data used should be relevant to the task the
model is trained to perform. In mathematical terms, the input data's distribution p(x)

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must contain information about the posterior distribution p(y|x), which represents the
probability of a given data point (x) belonging to a certain class (y).

There are certain assumptions held for the working of semi-supervised learning like −

Smoothness Assumption
Cluster Assumption

Low Density Separation

Manifold Assumptions

Let us have a brief understanding about the above listed assumptions.

Smoothness Assumption

This assumption states that two data points x1 and x2 in a high-density region (belong
to same cluster) are close, so should be the corresponding output labels y1 and y2. On
the other hand, if the data points are in low density region, their outputs need not be
close

Cluster Assumption

Cluster assumption states that when data points are in the same cluster, they are likely
to be of the same class. Unlabeled data should aid in finding the boundary of each
cluster more accurately using clustering algorithms. Additionally, the labeled data points
should be used to assign a class for each cluster.

Low Density Separation

Low Density Separation assumption states that the decision boundary should lie in the
low density region. Consider digit recognition, for instance, one wants to distinguish a
handwritten digit 0 against digit 1. A sample point taken exactly from the decision
boundary will be between a 0 and a 1, most likely a digit looking like a very elongated
zero. But the probability that someone wrote this weird digit is very small.

Manifold Assumptions

This assumption forms the basis of several semi-supervised learning methods, it states
that in a higher-dimensional input space, there are several lower dimensional manifolds
where all data points exist, and data points with the same label are located on the same
manifold.

Semi-supervised Learning Techniques

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Semi-supervised learning uses several techniques to bring out the best from both labeled
and unlabeled data for accurate outcomes. Some popular techniques include −

Self-training

Self-training is a process in which any supervised method like classification and

regression, can be modified to work in a semi-supervised manner, taking insights from
both labeled and unlabeled data.

Co-training

This approach is an improved version of Self-training approach, where the idea wa to

make use of different "views" on the data that is to be classified. This is ideally used for
web content classification where, a web page can be represented by the text on the
page, and can also be represented by the hyperlinks referring to the pages. Unlike the
typical process, the co-training approach trains two individual classifiers based on two
views of data to improve learning performance.

Graph based label propagation

The most efficient way to run semi-supervised learning, it models data as graphs where
nodes represent data points and edges represent similarities between them, and then
the label propagation algorithm is applied. In this approach, labeled data points
propagate their labels through the graph, influencing the neighboring nodes. The labels
are iteratively updated, allowing the model to assign labels to unlabeled nodes.

Challenges of Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning requires only a small amount of labeled data along side large
set of unlabeled data, reducing the cost and need of manual labeling. In contrast, there
are a few challenges that has be addressed like −

Quality of data − The efficiency of semi-supervised learning depends on the

quality of unlabeled data. If the unlabeled data is noisy or irrelevant, there are
chances that it might to lead to incorrect predictions and poor performance.
Variation in the data − Semi-supervised learning models are more prone to
distribution shifts between the labeled and unlabeled data. For examples, a model
is trained on labeled dataset that consists clear high quality images where as the
if the unlabeled data contains images from captured from surveillance cameras, it
would be difficult to generalize from the labeled to the unlabeled images,
impacting the outcomes.

Applications of Semi-supervised Learning

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Semi-supervised machine learning finds its application in text classification, image

classification, speech analysis, anomaly detection, etc. where the general goal is to
classify an entity into a predefined category. Semi-supervised algorithm assumes that
the data can be divided into discrete clusters and the data points closer to each other are
more likely to share the same output label.

Some popular applications of semi-supervised learning are −

Speech Recognition − Labeling audio data is a time consuming task, semi-

supervised techniques improve speech models combining unlabeled audio data
alongside limited transcribed speech. This enhances the accuracy in recognizing
spoken language.

Web Content Classification − With billions of websites, manually labeling

content is impractical. Semi-supervised Learning helps classify web content
efficiently, improving search engines like Google in ranking and produces relevant
content to user queries.

Text Document Classification − Semi-supervised Learning is used to classify

text by training on small set of labeled documents and large corpus of unlabeled
text. The model first learns from labeled data to gain insights and then use it to
classify text. This learning methods helps improve the accuracy of classification
without the need for extensive labeled datasets.

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