# Automatic Debiased Learning from Positive, Unlabeled, and Exposure Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04797 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04797/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Recommendations as Treatments: Debiasing Learning and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05352/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Unbiased Learning-to-Rank with Biased Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04468/) (2016)
- [Unbiased Recommender Learning from Missing-Not-At-Random Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03601/) (2019)
- [Non-Negative Bregman Divergence Minimization for Deep Direct Density Ratio Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06979/) (2020)
- [Theoretical Comparisons of Positive-Unlabeled Learning against Positive-Negative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.03130/) (2016)
- [Beyond the Selected Completely At Random Assumption for Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03207/) (2018)
- [Classification from Positive, Unlabeled and Biased Negative Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00846/) (2018)
- [Mitigating Overfitting in Supervised Classification from Two Unlabeled Datasets: A Consistent Risk Correction Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.08974/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised AUC Optimization based on Positive-Unlabeled Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.01708/) (2017)
- [Collaborative Filtering with Social Exposure: A Modular Approach to Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11458/) (2017)
- [Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data under the Selected At Random Assumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.08755/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Biased Selective Labels to Pseudo-Labels: An Expectation-Maximization Framework for Learning from Biased Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18865/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the issue of binary classification from positive and unlabeled data (PU classification) with a selection bias in the positive data. During the observation process, (i) a sample is exposed to a user, (ii) the user then returns the label for the exposed sample, and (iii) we however can only observe the positive samples. Therefore, the positive labels that we observe are a combination of both the exposure and the labeling, which creates a selection bias problem for the observed positive samples. This scenario represents a conceptual framework for many practical applications, such as recommender systems, which we refer to as ``learning from positive, unlabeled, and exposure data'' (PUE classification). To tackle this problem, we initially assume access to data with exposure labels. Then, we propose a method to identify the function of interest using a strong ignorability assumption and develop an ``Automatic Debiased PUE'' (ADPUE) learning method. This algorithm directly debiases the selection bias without requiring intermediate estimates, such as the propensity score, which is necessary for other learning methods. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms traditional PU learning methods on various semi-synthetic datasets.