In many real-world applications, learning a classifier with false-positive rate under a specified tolerance is appealing. Existing approaches either introduce prior knowledge dependent label cost or tune parameters based on traditional classifiers, which are of limitation in methodology since they do not directly incorporate the false-positive rate tolerance. In this paper, we propose a novel scoring-thresholding approach, tau-False Positive Learning (tau-FPL) to address this problem. We show that the scoring problem which takes the false-positive rate tolerance into accounts can be efficiently solved in linear time, also an out-of-bootstrap thresholding method can transform the learned ranking function into a low false-positive classifier. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show superior performance of the proposed tau-FPL over the existing approaches.

Learning a classifier with control on the false-positive rate plays a critical role in many machine learning applications. Existing approaches either introduce prior knowledge dependent label cost or tune parameters based on traditional classifiers, which lack consistency in methodology because they do not strictly adhere to the false-positive rate constraint. In this paper, we propose a novel scoring-thresholding approach, tau-False Positive Learning (tau-FPL) to address this problem. We show the scoring problem which takes the false-positive rate tolerance into accounts can be efficiently solved in linear time, also an out-of-bootstrap thresholding method can transform the learned ranking function into a low false-positive classifier. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show superior performance of the proposed tau-FPL over existing approaches.