# Safe Semi-Supervised Learning of Sum-Product Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.03444 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03444/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Don't fear the unlabelled: safe semi-supervised learning via simple debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07512/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In several domains obtaining class annotations is expensive while at the same time unlabelled data are abundant. While most semi-supervised approaches enforce restrictive assumptions on the data distribution, recent work has managed to learn semi-supervised models in a non-restrictive regime. However, so far such approaches have only been proposed for linear models. In this work, we introduce semi-supervised parameter learning for Sum-Product Networks (SPNs). SPNs are deep probabilistic models admitting inference in linear time in number of network edges. Our approach has several advantages, as it (1) allows generative and discriminative semi-supervised learning, (2) guarantees that adding unlabelled data can increase, but not degrade, the performance (safe), and (3) is computationally efficient and does not enforce restrictive assumptions on the data distribution. We show on a variety of data sets that safe semi-supervised learning with SPNs is competitive compared to state-of-the-art and can lead to a better generative and discriminative objective value than a purely supervised approach.