Self-PU: Self Boosted and Calibrated Positive-Unlabeled Training

Xuxi Chen, Wuyang Chen, Tianlong Chen, Ye Yuan, Chen Gong, Kewei Chen, Zhangyang Wang
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 119:1510-1519, 2020.

Abstract

Many real-world applications have to tackle the Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning problem, i.e., learning binary classifiers from a large amount of unlabeled data and a few labeled positive examples. While current state-of-the-art methods employ importance reweighting to design various biased or unbiased risk estimators, they completely ignored the learning capability of the model itself, which could provide reliable supervision. This motivates us to propose a novel Self-PU learning framework, which seamlessly integrates PU learning and self-training. Self-PU highlights three “self”-oriented building blocks: a self-paced training algorithm that adaptively discovers and augments confident positive/negative examples as the training proceeds; a self-reweighted, instance-aware loss; and a self-distillation scheme that introduces teacher-students learning as an effective regularization for PU learning. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Self-PU on common PU learning benchmarks (MNIST and CIFAR10), which compare favorably against the latest competitors. Moreover, we study a real-world application of PU learning, i.e., classifying brain images of Alzheimer’s Disease. Self-PU obtains significantly improved results on the renowned Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database over existing methods.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-chen20b, title = {Self-{PU}: Self Boosted and Calibrated Positive-Unlabeled Training}, author = {Chen, Xuxi and Chen, Wuyang and Chen, Tianlong and Yuan, Ye and Gong, Chen and Chen, Kewei and Wang, Zhangyang}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {1510--1519}, year = {2020}, editor = {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti}, volume = {119}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {13--18 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/chen20b/chen20b.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/chen20b.html}, abstract = {Many real-world applications have to tackle the Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning problem, i.e., learning binary classifiers from a large amount of unlabeled data and a few labeled positive examples. While current state-of-the-art methods employ importance reweighting to design various biased or unbiased risk estimators, they completely ignored the learning capability of the model itself, which could provide reliable supervision. This motivates us to propose a novel Self-PU learning framework, which seamlessly integrates PU learning and self-training. Self-PU highlights three “self”-oriented building blocks: a self-paced training algorithm that adaptively discovers and augments confident positive/negative examples as the training proceeds; a self-reweighted, instance-aware loss; and a self-distillation scheme that introduces teacher-students learning as an effective regularization for PU learning. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Self-PU on common PU learning benchmarks (MNIST and CIFAR10), which compare favorably against the latest competitors. Moreover, we study a real-world application of PU learning, i.e., classifying brain images of Alzheimer’s Disease. Self-PU obtains significantly improved results on the renowned Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database over existing methods.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Self-PU: Self Boosted and Calibrated Positive-Unlabeled Training %A Xuxi Chen %A Wuyang Chen %A Tianlong Chen %A Ye Yuan %A Chen Gong %A Kewei Chen %A Zhangyang Wang %B Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2020 %E Hal Daumé III %E Aarti Singh %F pmlr-v119-chen20b %I PMLR %P 1510--1519 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/chen20b.html %V 119 %X Many real-world applications have to tackle the Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning problem, i.e., learning binary classifiers from a large amount of unlabeled data and a few labeled positive examples. While current state-of-the-art methods employ importance reweighting to design various biased or unbiased risk estimators, they completely ignored the learning capability of the model itself, which could provide reliable supervision. This motivates us to propose a novel Self-PU learning framework, which seamlessly integrates PU learning and self-training. Self-PU highlights three “self”-oriented building blocks: a self-paced training algorithm that adaptively discovers and augments confident positive/negative examples as the training proceeds; a self-reweighted, instance-aware loss; and a self-distillation scheme that introduces teacher-students learning as an effective regularization for PU learning. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of Self-PU on common PU learning benchmarks (MNIST and CIFAR10), which compare favorably against the latest competitors. Moreover, we study a real-world application of PU learning, i.e., classifying brain images of Alzheimer’s Disease. Self-PU obtains significantly improved results on the renowned Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database over existing methods.
APA
Chen, X., Chen, W., Chen, T., Yuan, Y., Gong, C., Chen, K. & Wang, Z.. (2020). Self-PU: Self Boosted and Calibrated Positive-Unlabeled Training. Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 119:1510-1519 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/chen20b.html.

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