Title: On Consistency of Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning,
Abstract: Graph-based semi-supervised learning is one of the most popular methods in
machine learning. Some of its theoretical properties such as bounds for the
generalization error and the convergence of the graph Laplacian regularizer
have been studied in computer science and statistics literatures. However, a
fundamental statistical property, the consistency of the estimator from this
method has not been proved. In this article, we study the consistency problem
under a non-parametric framework. We prove the consistency of graph-based
learning in the case that the estimated scores are enforced to be equal to the
observed responses for the labeled data. The sample sizes of both labeled and
unlabeled data are allowed to grow in this result. When the estimated scores
are not required to be equal to the observed responses, a tuning parameter is
used to balance the loss function and the graph Laplacian regularizer. We give
a counterexample demonstrating that the estimator for this case can be
inconsistent. The theoretical findings are supported by numerical studies.