A self-training algorithm based on the two-stage data editing method with mass-based dissimilarity

A self-training algorithm is a classical semi-supervised learning algorithm that uses a small number of labeled samples and a large number of unlabeled samples to train a classifier. However, the existing self-training algorithms consider only the geometric distance between data while ignoring the data distribution when calculating the similarity between samples. In addition, misclassified samples can severely affect the performance of a self-training algorithm. To address the above two problems, this paper proposes a self-training algorithm based on data editing with mass-based dissimilarity (STDEMB). First, the mass matrix with the mass-based dissimilarity is obtained, and then the mass-based local density of each sample is determined based on its k nearest neighbors. Inspired by density peak clustering (DPC), this study designs a prototype tree based on the prototype concept. In addition, an efficient two-stage data editing algorithm is developed to edit misclassified samples and efficiently select high-confidence samples during the self-training process. The proposed STDEMB algorithm is verified by experiments using accuracy and F-score as evaluation metrics. The experimental results on 18 benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed STDEMB algorithm.