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UC-PUAL: A universally consistent classifier of positive-unlabelled data

Wang, X., Zhu, R. ORCID: 0000-0002-9944-0369 & Xue, J-H. (2026). UC-PUAL: A universally consistent classifier of positive-unlabelled data. Pattern Recognition, 169, article number 111892. doi: 10.1016/j.patcog.2025.111892

Abstract

Positive-unlabelled (PU) learning is a challenging task in pattern recognition, as there are only labelled-positive instances and unlabelled instances available for the training of a classifier. The task becomes even harder when the PU data show an underlying trifurcate pattern that positive instances roughly distribute on both sides of ground-truth negative instances. To address this issue, we propose a universally consistent PU classifier with asymmetric loss (UC-PUAL) on positive instances. We also propose two three-block algorithms for non-convex optimisation to enable UC-PUAL to obtain linear and kernel-induced non-linear decision boundaries, respectively. Theoretical and experimental results verify the superiority of UC-PUAL. The code for UC-PUAL is available at https://github.com/tkks22123/UC-PUAL.

Publication Type: Article
Additional Information: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Publisher Keywords: Positive-unlabelled learning, Universal consistency, Trifurcate data
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HA Statistics
Q Science > QA Mathematics
Departments: Bayes Business School
Bayes Business School > Actuarial Science & Insurance
SWORD Depositor:
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