Joint Label Inference and Discriminant Embedding

Graph-based learning in semisupervised models provides an effective tool for modeling big data sets in high-dimensional spaces. It has been useful for propagating a small set of initial labels to a large set of unlabeled data. Thus, it meets the requirements of many emerging applications. However, in real-world applications, the scarcity of labeled data can negatively affect the performance of the semisupervised method. In this article, we present a new framework for semisupervised learning called joint label inference and discriminant embedding for soft label inference and linear feature extraction. The proposed criterion and its associated optimization algorithm take advantage of both labeled and unlabeled data samples in order to estimate the discriminant transformation. This type of criterion should allow learning more discriminant semisupervised models. Nine public image data sets are used in the experiments and method comparisons. These experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of many advanced semisupervised graph-based algorithms.