Unlabeled Data Can Degrade Classification Performance of Generative Classifiers

May 2002

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2002)

All Papers

This paper analyzes the effect of unlabeled training data in generative classifiers. We are interested in classification performance when unlabeled data are added to an existing pool of labeled data. We show that unlabeled data can degrade the performance of a classifier when there are discrepancies between modeling assumptions used to build the classifier and the actual model that generates the data; our analysis of this situation explains several seemingly disparate results in the literature.