A Novel Maximum Mean Discrepancy-Based Semi-Supervised Learning Algorithm

To provide more external knowledge for training self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms, this paper proposes a maximum mean discrepancy-based SSL (MMD-SSL) algorithm, which trains a well-performing classifier by iteratively refining the classifier using highly confident unlabeled samples. The MMD-SSL algorithm performs three main steps. First, a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is trained based on the labeled samples and is then used to assign labels to unlabeled samples. Second, the unlabeled samples are divided into multiple groups with the k -means clustering algorithm. Third, the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) criterion is used to measure the distribution consistency between k -means-clustered samples and MLP-classified samples. The samples having a consistent distribution are labeled as highly confident samples and used to retrain the MLP. The MMD-SSL algorithm performs an iterative training until all unlabeled samples are consistently labeled. We conducted extensive experiments on 29 benchmark data sets to validate the rationality and effectiveness of the MMD-SSL algorithm. Experimental results show that the generalization capability of the MLP algorithm can gradually improve with the increase of labeled samples and the statistical analysis demonstrates that the MMD-SSL algorithm can provide better testing accuracy and kappa values than 10 other self-training and co-training SSL algorithms.