Discriminatory target learning: mining significant dependence relationships from labeled and unlabeled data

© 2019 by the authors. Machine learning techniques have shown superior predictive power, among which Bayesian network classifiers (BNCs) have remained of great interest due to its capacity to demonstrate complex dependence relationships. Most traditional BNCs tend to build only one model to fit training instances by analyzing independence between attributes using conditional mutual information. However, for different class labels, the conditional dependence relationships may be different rather than invariant when attributes take different values, which may result in classification bias. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, called discriminatory target learning, which can be regarded as a tradeoff between probabilistic model learned from unlabeled instance at the uncertain end and that learned from labeled training data at the certain end. The final model can discriminately represent the dependence relationships hidden in unlabeled instance with respect to different possible class labels. Taking k-dependence Bayesian classifier as an example, experimental comparison on 42 publicly available datasets indicated that the final model achieved competitive classification performance compared to state-of-the-art learners such as Random forest and averaged one-dependence estimators