Bidirectional Label Propagation over Graphs

Graph-Based label propagation algorithms are popular in the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning research. The key idea underlying this algorithmic family is to enforce labeling consistency between any two examples with a positive similarity. However, negative similarities or dissimilarities are equivalently valuable in practice. To this end, we simultaneously leverage similarities and dissimilarities in our proposed semi-supervised learning algorithm which we term Bidirectional Label Propagation (BLP). Different from previous label propagation mechanisms that proceed along a single direction of graph edges, the BLP algorithm can propagate labels along not only positive but also negative edge directions. By using an initial neighborhood graph and class assignment constraints inherent among the labeled examples, a set of class-specific graphs are learned, which include both positive and negative edges and thus reveal discriminative cues. Over the learned graphs, a convex propagation criterion is carried out to ensure consistent labelings along the positive edges and inconsistent labelings along the negative edges. Experimental evidence discovered in synthetic and real-world datasets validates excellent performance of the proposed BLP algorithm.