Label Propagation and Quadratic Criterion.

Abstract

Abstract This chapter shows how the different graph-based algorithms for semi-supervised learning can be cast into a common framework where one minimizes a quadratic cost criterion whose closed-form solution is found by solving a linear system of size n (total number of data points). The cost criterion naturally leads to an extension of such algorithms to the inductive setting, where one obtains test samples one at a time: the derived induction formula can be evaluated in O(n) time, which is much more efficient than solving again exactly the linear system (which in general costs O(kn2) time for a sparse graph where each data point has k neighbors). This inductive formula is also used to show that when the similarity between points satisfies a locality property, then the algorithms are plagued by the curse of dimensionality, with respect to the dimensionality of an underlying manifold.