Making Binary Classification from Multiple Unlabeled Datasets Almost
  Free of Supervision
Yuhao Wu Xiaobo Xia Jun Yu Bo Han Gang Niu Masashi Sugiyama Tongliang Liu
Training a classifier exploiting a huge amount of supervised data is
expensive or even prohibited in a situation, where the labeling cost is high.
The remarkable progress in working with weaker forms of supervision is binary
classification from multiple unlabeled datasets which requires the knowledge of
exact class priors for all unlabeled datasets. However, the availability of
class priors is restrictive in many real-world scenarios. To address this
issue, we propose to solve a new problem setting, i.e., binary classification
from multiple unlabeled datasets with only one pairwise numerical relationship
of class priors (MU-OPPO), which knows the relative order (which unlabeled
dataset has a higher proportion of positive examples) of two class-prior
probabilities for two datasets among multiple unlabeled datasets. In MU-OPPO,
we do not need the class priors for all unlabeled datasets, but we only require
that there exists a pair of unlabeled datasets for which we know which
unlabeled dataset has a larger class prior. Clearly, this form of supervision
is easier to be obtained, which can make labeling costs almost free. We propose
a novel framework to handle the MU-OPPO problem, which consists of four
sequential modules: (i) pseudo label assignment; (ii) confident example
collection; (iii) class prior estimation; (iv) classifier training with
estimated class priors. Theoretically, we analyze the gap between estimated
class priors and true class priors under the proposed framework. Empirically,
we confirm the superiority of our framework with comprehensive experiments.
Experimental results demonstrate that our framework brings smaller estimation
errors of class priors and better performance of binary classification.