Semi-supervised Learning for Regression with Co-training by Committee

Semi-supervised learning is a paradigm that exploits the unlabeled data in addition to the labeled data to improve the generalization error of a supervised learning algorithm. Although in real-world applications regression is as important as classification, most of the research in semi-supervised learning concentrates on classification. In particular, although Co-Training is a popular semi-supervised learning algorithm, there is not much work to develop new Co-Training style algorithms for semi-supervised regression. In this paper, a semi-supervised regression framework, denoted by CoBCReg is proposed, in which an ensemble of diverse regressors is used for semi-supervised learning that requires neither redundant independent views nor different base learning algorithms. Experimental results show that CoBCReg can effectively exploit unlabeled data to improve the regression estimates.