Papers on “unsupervised learning”
Research on “unsupervised learning” in the 480 tracked journals: papers per year and category, the journals, institutions and countries publishing it, the keywords studied with it and its most-cited papers. It is not among the most frequent keywords of the last 30 days, so this page has no list of its latest papers. Also as Markdown.
← Top research keywords · Keyword trends
Key findings#
- From 2017 to 2026 (so far), the keyword “unsupervised learning” appeared in 857 papers in the tracked journals, most of them in AI (759), operations research (39) and statistics (14).
- 102 of them were published in 2025, against 43 in 2017.
- Since 2023, the institutions with the most of these papers were Chinese Academy of Sciences (15), Sun Yat-sen University (15) and Nanyang Technological University (12).
- The journals publishing most of them were IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (44), Pattern Recognition (35) and Expert Systems with Applications (35).
- The most-cited of them is “A Survey on Multi-Task Learning” (IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2021), with 2,909 citations.
Papers per year#
20172026 (so far)
| Category | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 (so far) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI | 39 | 41 | 66 | 63 | 93 | 120 | 92 | 95 | 91 | 59 |
| Operations Research | 2 | 1 | 0 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 10 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
| Statistics | 0 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Information Systems | 1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Management | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Economics | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 1 |
| Finance | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Higher Education and Research | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| Marketing | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Accounting | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| All categories | 43 | 50 | 68 | 75 | 100 | 135 | 108 | 106 | 102 | 70 |
Where the papers come from#
| # | Journal | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 44 |
| 2 | Pattern Recognition | 35 |
| 3 | Expert Systems with Applications | 35 |
| 4 | Knowledge-Based Systems | 32 |
| 5 | IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems | 30 |
| 6 | IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering | 23 |
| 7 | Neural Networks | 22 |
| 8 | Neural Computing and Applications | 17 |
| 9 | Applied Intelligence | 13 |
| 10 | Information Fusion | 13 |
| # | Institution | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chinese Academy of Sciences | 15 |
| 2 | Sun Yat-sen University | 15 |
| 3 | Nanyang Technological University | 12 |
| 4 | Tsinghua University | 12 |
| 5 | University of Chinese Academy of Sciences | 12 |
| 6 | National University of Defense Technology | 11 |
| 7 | University of Electronic Science and Technology of China | 11 |
| 8 | Northwestern Polytechnical University | 10 |
| 9 | Wuhan University | 9 |
| 10 | South China University of Technology | 8 |
| # | Country | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 215 |
| 2 | United States | 47 |
| 3 | Singapore | 21 |
| 4 | Australia | 18 |
| 5 | United Kingdom | 18 |
| 6 | France | 16 |
| 7 | Italy | 14 |
| 8 | Canada | 13 |
| 9 | Germany | 13 |
| 10 | Spain | 13 |
| # | Keyword | Papers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | anomaly detection | 28 |
| 2 | supervised learning | 27 |
| 3 | contrastive learning | 25 |
| 4 | graph neural networks | 17 |
| 5 | semi-supervised learning | 17 |
| 6 | clustering | 13 |
| 7 | self-supervised learning | 13 |
| 8 | autoencoder | 12 |
| 9 | data augmentation | 12 |
Most-cited papers#
| # | Citations | Per month | Title | Journal | Published | Authors |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2,909 | 43.3 | A Survey on Multi-Task Learning | IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering | 2021-03-31 | Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang |
| 2 | 2,308 | 30.7 | U2Fusion: A Unified Unsupervised Image Fusion Network | IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 2020-07-28 | Han Xu, Jiayi Ma, Junjun Jiang et al. |
| 3 | 1,410 | 14.9 | Deep learning in spiking neural networks | Neural Networks | 2018-12-18 | Amirhossein Tavanaei, Masoud Ghodrati, Saeed Reza Kheradpisheh et al. |
| 4 | 673 | 7.1 | Advances in Variational Inference | IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence | 2018-12-25 | Cheng Zhang, Judith Bütepage, Hedvig Kjellström et al. |
| 5 | 672 | 11.3 | Multi-sensor information fusion based on machine learning for real applications in human activity recognition: State-of-the-art and research challenges | Information Fusion | 2021-11-13 | Sen Qiu, Hongkai Zhao, Nan Jiang et al. |
Cite this page
Scholar4AI. (2026). Papers on “unsupervised learning”. Journal and Conference Research Rankings. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-learning
@misc{scholar4ai-keywords-unsupervised-learning,
author = {{Scholar4AI}},
title = {Papers on “unsupervised learning”},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/keywords/unsupervised-learning}},
urldate = {2026-11-03},
note = {Journal and Conference Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}