Semi-supervised Node Splitting for Random Forest Construction

Xiao Liu, Mingli Song, Dacheng Tao, Zicheng Liu, Luming Zhang, Chun Chen, Jiajun Bu; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2013, pp. 492-499

Node splitting is an important issue in Random Forest but robust splitting requires a large number of training samples. Existing solutions fail to properly partition the feature space if there are insufficient training data. In this paper, we present semi-supervised splitting to overcome this limitation by splitting nodes with the guidance of both labeled and unlabeled data. In particular, we derive a nonparametric algorithm to obtain an accurate quality measure of splitting by incorporating abundant unlabeled data. To avoid the curse of dimensionality, we project the data points from the original high-dimensional feature space onto a low-dimensional subspace before estimation. A unified optimization framework is proposed to select a coupled pair of subspace and separating hyperplane such that the smoothness of the subspace and the quality of the splitting are guaranteed simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is compared with state-of-the-art supervised and semi-supervised algorithms for typical computer vision applications such as object categorization and image segmentation. Experimental results on publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.