Beyond Myopia: Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data through Holistic Predictive Trends

Learning binary classifiers from positive and unlabeled data (PUL) is vital in many real-world applications, especially when verifying negative examples is difficult. Despite the impressive empirical performance of recent PUL methods, challenges like accumulated errors and increased estimation bias persist due to the absence of negative labels. In this paper, we unveil an intriguing yet long-overlooked observation in PUL: \textit{resampling the positive data in each training iteration to ensure a balanced distribution between positive and unlabeled examples results in strong early-stage performance. Furthermore, predictive trends for positive and negative classes display distinctly different patterns.} Specifically, the scores (output probability) of unlabeled negative examples consistently decrease, while those of unlabeled positive examples show largely chaotic trends. Instead of focusing on classification within individual time frames, we innovatively adopt a holistic approach, interpreting the scores of each example as a temporal point process (TPP). This reformulates the core problem of PUL as recognizing trends in these scores. We then propose a novel TPP-inspired measure for trend detection and prove its asymptotic unbiasedness in predicting changes. Notably, our method accomplishes PUL without requiring additional parameter tuning or prior assumptions, offering an alternative perspective for tackling this problem. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our method, particularly in a highly imbalanced real-world setting, where it achieves improvements of up to $11.3\%$ in key metrics. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/wxr99/HolisticPU}{https://github.com/wxr99/HolisticPU}.

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Peer review

Reviewer 3ytg7/10 · confidence 4/52023-06-30

Summary

In this paper, the authors investigate a phenomenon appearing in positive and unlabeled data learning. i.e. predictive trends is different for positive and negative classes in binary classification task. Based on this observation, the authors propose a holistic approach to capture the predictive trends of different instances. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data sets validate the effectiveness of proposed method.

Strengths

(1) The phenomenon appearing in positive and unlabeled data learning is interesting, i.e. predictive trends is different for positive and negative classes in binary classification task. (2) Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic data sets validate the effectiveness of proposed method.

Weaknesses

However, there still exists several shortcomings to be overcome as follows: (1) In experiments, the comparing algorithms are not presented. (2) In Figure 3, what does it mean "No trend"? The trend score is a constant or not? (3) By using trend score, the problem of unlabeled data classification is transformed as threshold selection, which requires that the trend score exhibits obvious difference for these two classes. Although the authors leverage Fisher Criterion to induce the positive and negative classes, as shown in Figure 1, the predictive trend on CIFAR10 is not completely consistent with the assumption. How does the author view this issue? =====after rebuttal===== The authors' responses have well addressed most of my concerns of this paper. I would like to raise my overall score from 6 to 7 and recommend acceptance on this paper.

Questions

By using trend score, the problem of unlabeled data classification is transformed as threshold selection, which requires that the trend score exhibits obvious difference for these two classes. Although the authors leverage Fisher Criterion to induce the positive and negative classes, as shown in Figure 1, the predictive trend on CIFAR10 is not completely consistent with the assumption. How does the author view this issue? =====after rebuttal===== The authors' responses have well addressed most of my concerns of this paper. I would like to raise my overall score from 6 to 7 and recommend acceptance on this paper.

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Yes

Reviewer EzoK7/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-03

Summary

The paper focuses on addressing the positive and unlabeled learning problem. The authors make an observation that a simple resampling method can yield strong early-stage performance, which has been overlooked in previous literature. Building on this insight, the paper proposes a trend detection measure to tackle the PU learning problem. The proposed method is supported by both theoretical and empirical results.

Strengths

1. This work studies an important problem, and it is well-written and easy to follow. 2. The motivation and proposed method are clearly described. It's definitely a new way to approach the positive and unlabeled learning problem from the perspective of trend detection. 3. The proposed PU learning approach requires no explicit computation of the class prior and avoids the need for additional tuning efforts and assumptions. 4. The experiments are well-conducted, and comprehensively compared to recent SOTA methods. Ablations and sensitivity analysis are also abundant. Overall, the paper presents a novel insight for the positive and unlabeled learning problem , and the contribution is definitely relevant and significant.

Weaknesses

1. Although it is mentioned that the proposal can be applied to more machine learning topics, further explanation should be included. 2. Can other clustering methods could yield better empirical performance compared with Algorithm 1

Questions

1. In addition to the positive and unlabeled learning problem, can the proposed approach be applied to other machine learning topics such as semi-supervised learning and learning with noisy labels 2.Why does the performance of the proposed approach vary with different choices of positive priors For example, in Tab10, when highly imbalanced positive priors are used, the proposed algorithm displays a notable gap in performance. 1. Can the proposed Fisher natural break point method be considered a universal approach for multi-class classification, or are there limitations to its applicability

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

This is an algorithmic work, and the authors have addressed some limitations.

Reviewer 3dQ96/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-07

Summary

In this paper, the authors investigate the topic of positive and unlabeled learning, and solve it from an interesting perspective, namely trend score. The story begins with the empirical observations of different temporal output score trends of positive instances, unlabeled negative instances, and unlabeled positive instances. Based on the observations, the authors propose to compute the trend score under the temporal point process, and use the trend scores to distinguish positive and negative from unlabeled instances. The authors conduct numbers of experiments, and the results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Strengths

The idea is novel for PU learning. - The paper is easy-to-follow. - Extensive empirical results.

Weaknesses

Please refer to the following Questions section.

Questions

Overall, I argue the idea of this paper is interesting, but I still have several questions: 1. If the trend score is the major contribution, whether the resampling is a must in the framework? What are the relationships between them? 2. The authors compute the trend scores for all unlabeled instances and then use them to identify the positive instances from them. Is that right? 3. In the problem formulation, the positive label is denoted as y=0. So why the predictive trend of positive instances is “increasing”?

Rating

6: Weak Accept: Technically solid, moderate-to-high impact paper, with no major concerns with respect to evaluation, resources, reproducibility, ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

N/A

Reviewer vUs87/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-08

Summary

The paper addresses the positive and unlabeled learning problem and presents interesting and meaningful observations. Inspired by the observations, the authors propose an innovative approach that effectively discriminates between positive and negative examples within unlabeled data. The performance of this approach is validated on both synthetic and real-world datasets, further confirming its superiority.

Strengths

- (Clarity) The paper is well organized and clearly written, the figures are also informative and well-designed. - (Novelty) The paper is thought-provoking! Handling the PUL problem from the perspective of predicting trends is highly innovative. Furthermore, the proposed techniques are also novel as far as I can tell. - (Quality) The paper is of good quality in my opinion. The algorithm is well designed for identifying trend prediction (via Trend Score) and clustering unlabeled data (via the improved Fisher Criterion). The technical details are all correct as far as I can tell. The empirical evaluation is also comprehensive, covering 6 datasets, including synthetic and real-world datasets, and comparing against popular baselines. - (Significance) The proposed techniques are simple, easy to implement and experimentally highly effective, making the algorithm a strong, potentially impactful baseline for future researchers & practitioners to use and/or improve upon.

Weaknesses

1. It would be appropriate to discuss why there can be significantly different prediction trends for positive and negative examples in unlabeled data. 2. Both Table 1 and Table 2 lack the experiments on STL10, although you mentioned in Table 2 that the reason is "the true labels of unlabeled data are not available in STL10." However, a better choice would have been to provide an explanation for the absence of this experiment from the first occurrence.

Questions

1. Is it feasible to apply trend prediction methods in other fields, such as semi-supervised learning? 2. Does recording the predicted values at every iteration for trend analysis yield the best performance? What if we record the predictions every 3 iterations instead? how about every 5 iterations?

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

NA

Reviewer cdNW7/10 · confidence 4/52023-07-09

Summary

The paper proposed an interesting idea of using the trend detection technique for positive and unlabeled learning (PUL). The core problem of PUL is thus reformulated as recognizing trends in these scores. A new TPP-inspired measure is then utilized to solve the task. The idea of the paper is interesting; it is well-motivated and well-supported with a range of experiments from fraud detection and computer vision tasks. ----------------------- After rebuttal: I am satisfied with the rebuttal and would like to increase my score.

Strengths

1. The proposed technique is well motivated and clearly distinguished from prior works. 2. The PUL model achieves good performance in the early training stage is an interesting phenomenon and worth studying. 3. The proposed method is technically sound and it demonstrates a strong performance against both two-step methods and popular reweighting strategies. Plus, comprehensive experimental results on benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate the phenonmenon and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Weaknesses

1. The paper attributes the performance downgrade after the early stage success to the label noise problem and the data imbalance problem. However, it is unclear whether all existing reweighting or resampling methods can achieve the same state-of-the-art (SOTA) test set performance in the early training stage and witness a quick performance degradation. 2. std should be included in the experimental results such as those demonstrated in Figure 1.

Questions

1. The comparison with ImbalancedPU in Table 10 in Appendix is interesting to me. Can authors provide a more detailed experimental setting? As the proposed technique is clearly distinguished from prior works. Can we expect the method also achieves decent performance under a class-conditional label noise or imbalance? Some reference: 1. "Centroid Estimation with Guaranteed Efficiency: A General Framework for Weakly Supervised Learning" 2. "Learning from Corrupted Binary Labels via Class-Probability Estimation" 2. It's mentioned that the proposed approach does not rely on the "selected completely at random" (SCAR) assumption? Some further discussions are suggested. 3. What does stopping iteration mean in Sec3?

Rating

7: Accept: Technically solid paper, with high impact on at least one sub-area, or moderate-to-high impact on more than one areas, with good-to-excellent evaluation, resources, reproducibility, and no unaddressed ethical considerations.

Confidence

4: You are confident in your assessment, but not absolutely certain. It is unlikely, but not impossible, that you did not understand some parts of the submission or that you are unfamiliar with some pieces of related work.

Soundness

3 good

Presentation

3 good

Contribution

3 good

Limitations

Yes

Area Chair 92T62023-08-16

Author-Reviewer Discussion Period Closing Soon

Thank you reviewers for your work in evaluating this submission, and thank you authors for responding to the reviewers’ questions and concerns. We are entering the final phase of the discussion period, which will run until August 21st, and some of the authors' responses have to been acknowledged by all the reviewers. Reviewers: If you have any lingering questions or comments on the rebuttal or the responses, now is the time to express them. At the very least, please acknowledge that you have read the authors’ response to your review. Thank you everyone for making the review process a fruitful, constructive, and civil process. AC

Reviewer vUs82023-08-20

Thanks for the author's response. I would also maintain my initial score of accept.

Reviewer EzoK2023-08-20

The authors answer all my concerns, and I keep my initial score on this work.

Program Chairsdecision2023-09-21

Decision

Accept (spotlight)

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