Posistive-Unlabeled Learning via Optimal Transport and Margin Distribution

Posistive-Unlabeled Learning via Optimal Transport and Margin Distribution

Nan Cao, Teng Zhang, Xuanhua Shi, Hai Jin

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2836-2842. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/393

Positive-unlabeled (PU) learning deals with the circumstances where only a portion of positive instances are labeled, while the rest and all negative instances are unlabeled, and due to this confusion, the class prior can not be directly available. Existing PU learning methods usually estimate the class prior by training a nontraditional probabilistic classifier, which is prone to give an overestimation. Moreover, these methods learn the decision boundary by optimizing the minimum margin, which is not suitable in PU learning due to its sensitivity to label noise. In this paper, we enhance PU learning methods from the above two aspects. More specifically, we first explicitly learn a transformation from unlabeled data to positive data by entropy regularized optimal transport to achieve a much more precise estimation for class prior. Then we switch to optimizing the margin distribution, rather than the minimum margin, to obtain a label noise insensitive classifier. Extensive empirical studies on both synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Classification
Machine Learning: Weakly Supervised Learning