Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Our work is related to one-class classification which is aimed at "describing" the positive class by clustering-related methods, but one-class classification does not have the ability to tune hyper-parameters

The binary classification problem has a situation where only biased data are observed in one of the classes. In this paper, we propose a new method to approach the positive and biased negative (PbN) classification problem, which is a weakly supervised learning method to learn a binary classifier from positive data and negative data with biased observations. We incorporate a method to correct the negative impact due to skewed confidence, which represents the posterior probability that the observed data are positive. This reduces the distortion of the posterior probability that the data are labeled, which is necessary for the empirical risk minimization of the PbN classification problem. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by numerical experiments and real data analysis.

Positive-confidence (Pconf) classification [Ishida et al., 2018] is a promising weakly-supervised learning method which trains a binary classifier only from positive data equipped with confidence. However, in practice, the confidence may be skewed by bias arising in an annotation process. The Pconf classifier cannot be properly learned with skewed confidence, and consequently, the classification performance might be deteriorated. In this paper, we introduce the parameterized model of the skewed confidence, and propose the method for selecting the hyperparameter which cancels out the negative impact of skewed confidence under the assumption that we have the misclassification rate of positive samples as a prior knowledge. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through a synthetic experiment with simple linear models and benchmark problems with neural network models. We also apply our method to drivers' drowsiness prediction to show that it works well with a real-world problem where confidence is obtained based on manual annotation.

Can we learn a binary classifier from only positive data, without any negative data or unlabeled data? We show that if one can equip positive data with confidence (positive-confidence), one can successfully learn a binary classifier, which we name positive-confidence (Pconf) classification. Our work is related to one-class classification which is aimed at "describing" the positive class by clustering-related methods, but one-class classification does not have the ability to tune hyper-parameters and their aim is not on "discriminating" positive and negative classes. For the Pconf classification problem, we provide a simple empirical risk minimization framework that is model-independent and optimization-independent. We theoretically establish the consistency and an estimation error bound, and demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method for training deep neural networks through experiments.

Can we learn a binary classifier from only positive data, without any negative data or unlabeled data? We show that if one can equip positive data with confidence (positive-confidence), one can successfully learn a binary classifier, which we name positive-confidence (Pconf) classification. Our work is related to one-class classification which is aimed at "describing" the positive class by clustering-related methods, but one-class classification does not have the ability to tune hyper-parameters and their aim is not on "discriminating" positive and negative classes. For the Pconf classification problem, we provide a simple empirical risk minimization framework that is model-independent and optimization-independent. We theoretically establish the consistency and an estimation error bound, and demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method for training deep neural networks through experiments.

Reducing labeling costs in supervised learning is a critical issue in many practical machine learning applications. In this paper, we consider positive-confidence (Pconf) classification, the problem of training a binary classifier only from positive data equipped with confidence. Pconf classification can be regarded as a discriminative extension of one-class classification (which is aimed at "describing" the positive class by clustering-related methods), with ability to tune hyper-parameters for "classifying" positive and negative samples. Pconf classification is also related to positive-unlabeled (PU) classification (which uses hard-labeled positive data and unlabeled data), but the difference is that it enables us to avoid estimating the class priors, which is a critical bottleneck in typical PU classification methods. For the Pconf classification problem, we provide a simple empirical risk minimization framework and give a formulation for linear-in-parameter models that can be implemented easily and computationally efficiently. We also theoretically establish the consistency and estimation error bound for Pconf classification, and demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed method for deep neural networks through experiments.