A flocking-like technique to perform semi-supervised learning

Abstract

We present a nature-inspired semi-supervised learning technique based on the flocking formation of certain living species like birds and fishes. Each data item is treated as an individual in the flock. Starting from random directions, each data item moves according to its surrounding items, by getting closer to them (but not too much close) and taking the same direction of motion. Labeled items play special roles, ensuring that data from different classes will belong to different, distant flocks. Experiments on both artificial and benchmark datasets were performed and show its classification accuracy. Despite the rich behavior, we argue that this technique has a sub-quadratic asymptotic time complexity, thus being feasible to be used on large datasets. In order to achieve such performance, a space-partitioning technique is introduced. We also argue that the richness behind this dynamic, self-organizing model is quite robust and may be used to do much more than simply propagating the labels from labeled to unlabeled data. It could be used to determine class overlapping, wrong labeling, etc.