A large-scale and high-quality training dataset is an important guarantee to learn an ideal classifier for text sentiment classification. However, manually constructing such a training dataset with sentiment labels is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Therefore, based on the idea of effectively utilizing unlabeled samples, a synthetical framework that covers the whole process of semi-supervised learning from seed selection, iterative modification of the training text set, to the co-training strategy of the classifier is proposed in this paper for text sentiment classification. To provide an important basis for selecting the seed texts and modifying the training text set, three kinds of measures—the cluster similarity degree of an unlabeled text, the cluster uncertainty degree of a pseudo-label text to a learner, and the reliability degree of a pseudo-label text to a learner—are defined. With these measures, a seed selection method based on Random Swap clustering, a hybrid modification method of the training text set based on active learning and self-learning, and an alternately co-training strategy of the ensemble classifier of the Maximum Entropy and Support Vector Machine are proposed and combined into our framework. The experimental results on three Chinese datasets (COAE2014, COAE2015, and a Hotel review, respectively) and five English datasets (Books, DVD, Electronics, Kitchen, and MR, respectively) in the real world verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Bladder cancer is a malignant disease with substantial morbidity and mortality. Bladder cancer staging is crucial to determine the effective treatments of bladder tumors in clinic. As to the superiority of feature learning, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) are widely used to predict the cancer stage based on medical images. However, most existing DCNN-based cancer staging methods are data-driven and neglect the domain knowledge and experiences of clinicians. Besides, the deep neural networks are short of model interpretability and may lead to risky diagnosis. To tackle the problems, we construct the diagnosis rules of bladder cancer staging based on the clinical experiences of tumor penetration into bladder wall. The diagnosis rules are extracted from Magnetic Resonance (MR) images and further integrated into DCNN for joint identification of tumor stage. The experiments validate that the integrated rules improve the model interpretability and guide DCNN to focus on the regions of tumor penetration and thereby produce precise prediction of cancer staging.

Domain adaptation aims to learn a classifier for a target domain task by using related labeled data from the source domain. Because source domain data and target domain task may be mismatched, there is an uncertainty of source domain data with respect to the target domain task. Ignoring the uncertainty may lead to models with unreliable and suboptimal classification results for the target domain task. However, most previous works focus on reducing the gap in data distribution between the source and target domains. They do not consider the uncertainty of source domain data about the target domain task and cannot apply the uncertainty to learn an adaptive classifier. Aimed at this problem, we revisit the domain adaptation from source domain data uncertainty based on evidence theory and thereby devise an adaptive classifier with the uncertainty measure. Based on evidence theory, we first design an evidence net to estimate the uncertainty of source domain data about the target domain task. Second, we design a general loss function with the uncertainty measure for the adaptive classifier and extend the loss function to support vector machine. Finally, numerical experiments on simulation datasets and real-world applications are given to comprehensively demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive classifier with the uncertainty measure.