Ensemble learning from multiple information sources via label propagation and consensus

Many applications are facing the problem of learning from multiple information sources, where sources may be labeled or unlabeled, and information from multiple information sources may be beneficial but cannot be integrated into a single information source for learning. In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning method for different labeled and unlabeled sources. We first present two label propagation methods to infer the labels of training objects from unlabeled sources by making a full use of class label information from labeled sources and internal structure information from unlabeled sources, which are processes referred to as global consensus and local consensus, respectively. We then predict the labels of testing objects using the ensemble learning model of multiple information sources. Experimental results show that our method outperforms two baseline methods. Meanwhile, our method is more scalable for large information sources and is more robust for labeled sources with noisy data.