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Learning classifiers from only positive and unlabeled data

Published 24 August 2008
Charles Elkan, Keith Noto
Citations1,034

TL;DR

This paper shows that models trained using the new methods perform better than the current state-of-the-art biased SVM method for learning from positive and unlabeled examples, and applies them to solve a real-world problem: identifying protein records that should be included in an incomplete specialized molecular biology database.

Abstract

The input to an algorithm that learns a binary classifier normally consists of two sets of examples, where one set consists of positive examples of the concept to be learned, and the other set consists of negative examples. However, it is often the case that the available training data are an incomplete set of positive examples, and a set of unlabeled examples, some of which are positive and some of which are negative. The problem solved in this paper is how to learn a standard binary classifier given a nontraditional training set of this nature.

Keywords

Computer Science