# Uncertainty-aware Pseudo-label Selection for Positive-Unlabeled Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09457/) (2019)
- [A Review of Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning: Techniques, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06225/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [Label Propagation for Deep Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04717/) (2019)
- [Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Non-Negative Risk Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00593/) (2017)
- [Learning from positive and unlabeled data: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04820/) (2018)
- [Mixture Proportion Estimation and PU Learning: A Modern Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00980/) (2021)
- [Self-PU: Self Boosted and Calibrated Positive-Unlabeled Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11280/) (2020)
- [Class-prior Estimation for Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01586/) (2016)
- [Classification from Positive, Unlabeled and Biased Negative Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00846/) (2018)
- [Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data with Arbitrary Positive Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10261/) (2020)
- [Recovering True Classifier Performance in Positive-Unlabeled Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00518/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Split-PU: Hardness-aware Training Strategy for Positive-Unlabeled Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16756/) (2022)
- [Robust and Efficient Imbalanced Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02459/) (2022)
- [Improved proteasomal cleavage prediction with positive-unlabeled learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07527/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Positive-unlabeled learning (PUL) aims at learning a binary classifier from only positive and unlabeled training data. Even though real-world applications often involve imbalanced datasets where the majority of examples belong to one class, most contemporary approaches to PUL do not investigate performance in this setting, thus severely limiting their applicability in practice. In this work, we thus propose to tackle the issues of imbalanced datasets and model calibration in a PUL setting through an uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling procedure (PUUPL): by boosting the signal from the minority class, pseudo-labeling expands the labeled dataset with new samples from the unlabeled set, while explicit uncertainty quantification prevents the emergence of harmful confirmation bias leading to increased predictive performance. Within a series of experiments, PUUPL yields substantial performance gains in highly imbalanced settings while also showing strong performance in balanced PU scenarios across recent baselines. We furthermore provide ablations and sensitivity analyses to shed light on PUUPL's several ingredients. Finally, a real-world application with an imbalanced dataset confirms the advantage of our approach.