Online Manifold Regularization: A New Learning Setting and Empirical Study

We consider a novel “online semi-supervised learning” setting where (mostly unlabeled) data arrives sequentially in large volume, and it is impractical to store it all before learning. We propose an online manifold regularization algorithm. It differs from standard online learning in that it learns even when the input point is unlabeled. Our algorithm is based on convex programming in kernel space with stochastic gradient descent, and inherits the theoretical guarantees of standard online algorithms. However, näıve implementation of our algorithm does not scale well. This paper focuses on efficient, practical approximations; we discuss two sparse approximations using buffering and online random projection trees. Experiments show our algorithm achieves risk and generalization accuracy comparable to standard batch manifold regularization, while each step runs quickly. Our online semi-supervised learning setting is an interesting direction for further theoretical development, paving the way for semi-supervised learning to work on real-world lifelong learning tasks.