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Record W4408404791 · doi:10.1080/01621459.2025.2474266

Positive and Unlabeled Data: Model, Estimation, Inference, and Classification

2025· article· en· W4408404791 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the American Statistical Association · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMachine Learning and Data Classification
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Waterloo
KeywordsInferenceEstimationArtificial intelligenceComputer scienceStatisticsEconometricsMathematicsPattern recognition (psychology)Machine learningData miningEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This study introduces a new approach to addressing the positive and unlabeled (PU) data through the double exponential tilting model (DETM) under a transfer learning framework. Traditional methods often fall short because they only apply to the common distributions (CD) PU data (also known as the selected completely at random PU data), where the labeled positive and unlabeled positive data are assumed to be from the same distribution. In contrast, our DETM’s dual structure effectively accommodates the more complex and underexplored different distribution (DD) PU data (also known as the selected at random PU data), where the labeled and unlabeled positive data can be from different distributions. We rigorously establish the theoretical foundations of DETM, including identifiability, parameter estimation, and asymptotic properties. Additionally, we move forward to statistical inference by developing a goodness-of-fit test for the CD assumption and constructing confidence intervals for the proportion of positive instances in the target domain. We leverage an approximated Bayes classifier for classification tasks, demonstrating DETM’s robust performance in prediction. Through theoretical insights and practical applications, this study highlights DETM as a comprehensive framework for addressing the challenges of PU data.Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.879
Threshold uncertainty score0.408

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.018
GPT teacher head0.330
Teacher spread0.312 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it