A Study of Semi-supervised Generative Ensembles

Machine Learning can be divided into two schools of thought: generative model learning and discriminative model learning. While the MCS community has been focused mainly on the latter, our paper is concerned with questions that arise from ensembles of generative models. Generative models provide us with neat ways of thinking about two interesting learning issues: model selection and semi-supervised learning. Preliminary results show that for semi-supervised low-variance generative models, traditional MCS techniques like Bagging and Random Sub-space Method (RSM) do not outperform the single classifier approach. However, RSM introduces diversity between base classifiers. This starting point suggests that diversity between base components has to lie within the structure of the base classifier, and not in the dataset, and it highlights the need for novel generative ensemble learning techniques.