Hybrid local boosting utilizing unlabeled data in classification tasks

In many real life applications, a complete labeled data set is not always available. Therefore, an ideal learning algorithm should be able to learn from both labeled and unlabeled data. In this work a two stage local boosting algorithm for handling semi-supervised classification tasks is proposed. The proposed method can be simply described as: (a) a two stage local boosting method, (b) which adds self-labeled examples of unlabeled data and (c) employ them on semi-supervised classification tasks. Grounded on the local application of the boosting-by-reweighting version of AdaBoost, the proposed method utilizes unlabeled data to enhance it’s classification performance. Simulations on thirty synthetic and real-world benchmark data sets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms nine other well-known semi-supervised classification methods in terms of classification accuracy.