This paper introduces Transductive Support Vector Machines (TSVMs) for text classification. While regular Support Vector Machines (SVMs) try to induce a general decision function for a learning task, Transductive Support Vector Machines take into account a particular test set and try to minimize misclassifications of just those particular examples. The paper presents an analysis of why TSVMs are well suited for text classification. These theoretical findings are supported by experiments on three test collections. The experiments show substantial improvements over inductive methods, especially for small training sets, cutting the number of labeled training examples down to a twentieth on some tasks. This work also proposes an algorithm for training TSVMs efficiently, handling 10,000 examples and more.

Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (S3VMs) are an appealing method for using unlabeled data in classification: their objective function favors decision boundaries which do not cut clusters. However their main problem is that the optimization problem is non-convex and has many local minima, which often results in suboptimal performances. In this paper we propose to use a global optimization technique known as continuation to alleviate this problem. Compared to other algorithms minimizing the same objective function, our continuation method often leads to lower test errors. 1.

Due to its wide applicability, the problem of semi-supervised classification is attracting increasing attention in machine learning. Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machines (S 3 VMs) are based on applying the margin maximization principle to both labeled and unlabeled examples. Unlike SVMs, their formulation leads to a non-convex optimization problem. A suite of algorithms have recently been proposed for solving S 3 VMs. This paper reviews key ideas in this literature. The performance and behavior of various S 3 VM algorithms is studied together, under a common experimental setting.

Semi-supervised SVMs (S³VM) attempt to learn low-density separators by maximizing the margin over labeled and unlabeled examples. The associated optimization problem is non-convex. To examine the full potential of S3VMs modulo local minima problems in current implementations, we apply branch and bound techniques for obtaining exact, globally optimal solutions. Empirical evidence suggests that the globally optimal solution can return excellent generalization performance in situations where other implementations fail completely. While our current implementation is only applicable to small datasets, we discuss variants that can potentially lead to practically useful algorithms.

For many learning tasks, where data is collected over an extended period of time, one has to cope two problems. The distribution underlying the data is likely to change and only little labeled training data is available at each point in time. A typical example is information filtering, i. e. the adaptive classification of documents with respect to a particular user interest. Both the interest of the user and the document content change over time. A filtering system should be able to adapt to such concept changes. Since users often give little feedback, a filtering system should also be able to achieve a good performance, even if only few labeled training examples are provided. This paper proposes a method to recognize and handle concept changes with support vector machines and to use unlabeled data to reduce the need for labeled data. The method maintains windows on the training data, whose size is automatically adjusted so that the estimated generalization error is minimized. The approach is both theoretically well-founded as well as effective and efficient in practice. Since it does not require complicated parameterization, it is simpler to use and more robust than comparable heuristics. Experiments with simulated concept drift scenarios based on real-world text data compare the new method with other window management approaches and show that it can effectively select an appropriate window size in a robust way. In order to achieve an acceptable performance with fewer labeled training examples, the proposed method exploits unlabeled examples in a transductive way. 1

Semi-supervised learning is an emerging computational paradigm for learning from limited supervision by utilizing large amounts of inexpensive, unsupervised observations. Not only does this paradigm carry appeal as a model for natural learning, but it also has an increasing practical need in most if not all applications of machine learning – those where abundant amounts of data can be cheaply and automatically collected but manual labeling for the purposes of training learning algorithms is often slow, expensive, and error-prone. In this thesis, we develop families of algorithms for semi-supervised inference. These algorithms are based on intuitions about the natural structure and geometry of probability distributions that underlie typical datasets for learning. The classical framework of Regularization in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (which is the basis of state-of-the-art supervised algorithms such as SVMs) is extended in several ways to utilize unlabeled data. These extensions are embodied in the following contributions: (1) Manifold Regularization is based on the assumption that high-dimensional