  We consider the problem of offline, pool-based active semi-supervised
learning on graphs. This problem is important when the labeled data is scarce
and expensive whereas unlabeled data is easily available. The data points are
represented by the vertices of an undirected graph with the similarity between
them captured by the edge weights. Given a target number of nodes to label, the
goal is to choose those nodes that are most informative and then predict the
unknown labels. We propose a novel framework for this problem based on our
recent results on sampling theory for graph signals. A graph signal is a
real-valued function defined on each node of the graph. A notion of frequency
for such signals can be defined using the spectrum of the graph Laplacian
matrix. The sampling theory for graph signals aims to extend the traditional
Nyquist-Shannon sampling theory by allowing us to identify the class of graph
signals that can be reconstructed from their values on a subset of vertices.
This approach allows us to define a criterion for active learning based on
sampling set selection which aims at maximizing the frequency of the signals
that can be reconstructed from their samples on the set. Experiments show the
effectiveness of our method.
