No Arabic abstract
The scarcity of class-labeled data is a ubiquitous bottleneck in a wide range of machine learning problems. While abundant unlabeled data normally exist and provide a potential solution, it is extremely challenging to exploit them. In this paper, we address this problem by leveraging Positive-Unlabeled~(PU) classification and conditional generation with extra unlabeled data emph{simultaneously}, both of which aim to make full use of agnostic unlabeled data to improve classification and generation performances. In particular, we present a novel training framework to jointly target both PU classification and conditional generation when exposing to extra data, especially out-of-distribution unlabeled data, by exploring the interplay between them: 1) enhancing the performance of PU classifiers with the assistance of a novel Conditional Generative Adversarial Network~(CGAN) that is robust to noisy labels, 2) leveraging extra data with predicted labels from a PU classifier to help the generation. Our key contribution is a Classifier-Noise-Invariant Conditional GAN~(CNI-CGAN) that can learn the clean data distribution from noisy labels predicted by a PU classifier. Theoretically, we proved the optimal condition of CNI-CGAN and experimentally, we conducted extensive evaluations on diverse datasets, verifying the simultaneous improvements on both classification and generation.
In this paper, we consider a novel framework of positive-unlabeled data in which as positive data survival times are observed for subjects who have events during the observation time as positive data and as unlabeled data censoring times are observed but whether the event occurs or not are unknown for some subjects. We consider two cases: (1) when censoring time is observed in positive data, and (2) when it is not observed. For both cases, we developed parametric models, nonparametric models, and machine learning models and the estimation strategies for these models. Simulation studies show that under this data setup, traditional survival analysis may yield severely biased results, while the proposed estimation method can provide valid results.
$textbf{Background:}$ At the onset of a pandemic, such as COVID-19, data with proper labeling/attributes corresponding to the new disease might be unavailable or sparse. Machine Learning (ML) models trained with the available data, which is limited in quantity and poor in diversity, will often be biased and inaccurate. At the same time, ML algorithms designed to fight pandemics must have good performance and be developed in a time-sensitive manner. To tackle the challenges of limited data, and label scarcity in the available data, we propose generating conditional synthetic data, to be used alongside real data for developing robust ML models. $textbf{Methods:}$ We present a hybrid model consisting of a conditional generative flow and a classifier for conditional synthetic data generation. The classifier decouples the feature representation for the condition, which is fed to the flow to extract the local noise. We generate synthetic data by manipulating the local noise with fixed conditional feature representation. We also propose a semi-supervised approach to generate synthetic samples in the absence of labels for a majority of the available data. $textbf{Results:}$ We performed conditional synthetic generation for chest computed tomography (CT) scans corresponding to normal, COVID-19, and pneumonia afflicted patients. We show that our method significantly outperforms existing models both on qualitative and quantitative performance, and our semi-supervised approach can efficiently synthesize conditional samples under label scarcity. As an example of downstream use of synthetic data, we show improvement in COVID-19 detection from CT scans with conditional synthetic data augmentation.
We consider learning a multi-class classification model in the federated setting, where each user has access to the positive data associated with only a single class. As a result, during each federated learning round, the users need to locally update the classifier without having access to the features and the model parameters for the negative classes. Thus, naively employing conventional decentralized learning such as the distributed SGD or Federated Averaging may lead to trivial or extremely poor classifiers. In particular, for the embedding based classifiers, all the class embeddings might collapse to a single point. To address this problem, we propose a generic framework for training with only positive labels, namely Federated Averaging with Spreadout (FedAwS), where the server imposes a geometric regularizer after each round to encourage classes to be spreadout in the embedding space. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that FedAwS can almost match the performance of conventional learning where users have access to negative labels. We further extend the proposed method to the settings with large output spaces.
Understanding the relationships between biomedical terms like viruses, drugs, and symptoms is essential in the fight against diseases. Many attempts have been made to introduce the use of machine learning to the scientific process of hypothesis generation(HG), which refers to the discovery of meaningful implicit connections between biomedical terms. However, most existing methods fail to truly capture the temporal dynamics of scientific term relations and also assume unobserved connections to be irrelevant (i.e., in a positive-negative (PN) learning setting). To break these limits, we formulate this HG problem as future connectivity prediction task on a dynamic attributed graph via positive-unlabeled (PU) learning. Then, the key is to capture the temporal evolution of node pair (term pair) relations from just the positive and unlabeled data. We propose a variational inference model to estimate the positive prior, and incorporate it in the learning of node pair embeddings, which are then used for link prediction. Experiment results on real-world biomedical term relationship datasets and case study analyses on a COVID-19 dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
The similarity of feature representations plays a pivotal role in the success of domain adaptation and generalization. Feature similarity includes both the invariance of marginal distributions and the closeness of conditional distributions given the desired response $y$ (e.g., class labels). Unfortunately, traditional methods always learn such features without fully taking into consideration the information in $y$, which in turn may lead to a mismatch of the conditional distributions or the mix-up of discriminative structures underlying data distributions. In this work, we introduce the recently proposed von Neumann conditional divergence to improve the transferability across multiple domains. We show that this new divergence is differentiable and eligible to easily quantify the functional dependence between features and $y$. Given multiple source tasks, we integrate this divergence to capture discriminative information in $y$ and design novel learning objectives assuming those source tasks are observed either simultaneously or sequentially. In both scenarios, we obtain favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods in terms of smaller generalization error on new tasks and less catastrophic forgetting on source tasks (in the sequential setup).