SEMI-SUPERVISED SEQUENCE CLASSIFICATION WITH HMMs

Abstract

Using unlabeled data to help supervised learning has become an increasingly attractive methodology and proven to be effective in many applications. This paper applies semi-supervised classification algorithms, based on hidden Markov models, to classify sequences. For model-based classification, semi-supervised learning amounts to using both labeled and unlabeled data to train model parameters. We examine three different strategies of using labeled and unlabeled data in the model training process. These strategies differ in how and when labeled and unlabeled data contribute to the model training process. We also compare regular semi-supervised learning, where there are separate unlabeled training data and unlabeled test data, with transductive learning where we do not differentiate between unlabeled training data and unlabeled test data. Our experimental results on synthetic and real EEG time-series show that substantially improved classification accuracy can be achieved by these semi-supervised learning strategies. The effect of model complexity on semi-supervised learning is also studied in our experiments.