Positive-Unlabeled Learning in the Face of Labeling Bias

Noah Youngs, Dennis Shasha, Richard Bonneau

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning scenarios are a class of semi-supervised learning where only a fraction of the data is labeled, and all available labels are positive. The goal is to assign correct (positive and negative) labels to as much data as possible. Several important learning problems fall into the PU-learning domain, as in many cases the cost and feasibility of obtaining negative examples is prohibitive. In addition to the positive-negative disparity the overall cost of labeling these datasets typically leads to situations where the number of unlabeled examples greatly outnumbers the labeled. Accordingly, we perform several experiments, on both synthetic and real-world datasets, examining the performance of state of the art PU-learning algorithms when there is significant bias in the labeling process. We propose novel PU algorithms and demonstrate that they outperform the current state of the art on a variety of benchmarks. Lastly, we present a methodology for removing the costly parameter-tuning step in a popular PU algorithm.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop, ICDMW 2015
EditorsXindong Wu, Alexander Tuzhilin, Hui Xiong, Jennifer G. Dy, Charu Aggarwal, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Peng Cui
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages639-645
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781467384926
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 29 2016
Event15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop, ICDMW 2015 - Atlantic City, United States
Duration: Nov 14 2015Nov 17 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings - 15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop, ICDMW 2015

Other

Other15th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining Workshop, ICDMW 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlantic City
Period11/14/1511/17/15

Keywords

  • Machine Learning
  • Positive-Unlabeled Learning
  • Semi-Supervised Learning

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications

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