Semi-supervised Learning - Semi-supervised Learning in Human Cognition

Semi-supervised Learning in Human Cognition

Human responses to formal semi-supervised learning problems have yielded varying conclusions about the degree of influence of the unlabeled data (for a summary see ). More natural learning problems may also be viewed as instances of semi-supervised learning. Much of human concept learning involves a small amount of direct instruction (e.g. parental labeling of objects during childhood) combined with large amounts of unlabeled experience (e.g. observation of objects without naming or counting them, or at least without feedback).

Human infants are sensitive to the structure of unlabeled natural categories such as images of dogs and cats or male and female faces. More recent work has shown that infants and children take into account not only the unlabeled examples available, but the sampling process from which labeled examples arise .