AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence
Abstract
Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.
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BibTeX
@misc{kumagai2026maximization,
title = {{AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence}},
author = {Atsutoshi Kumagai and Tomoharu Iwata and Hiroshi Takahashi and Taishi Nishiyama and Kazuki Adachi and Yasuhiro Fujiwara},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.10928},
eprint = {2609.10928},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10928},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - AUC Maximization from Biased Positive-unlabeled Data with Confidence
AU - Atsutoshi Kumagai
AU - Tomoharu Iwata
AU - Hiroshi Takahashi
AU - Taishi Nishiyama
AU - Kazuki Adachi
AU - Yasuhiro Fujiwara
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/10
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.10928
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10928
AB - Maximizing the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a standard approach to imbalanced binary classification. Although positive and negative data are required for maximizing the AUC, negative data are often difficult to collect in some real-world applications due to privacy concerns or the need for specialized expertise to annotate them. Thus, AUC maximization from positive and unlabeled (PU) data has been attracting attention. Existing methods assume that labeled positive data are unbiased samples from the true positive distribution. However, this ideal assumption is often violated in practice. In this paper, we propose a method to maximize the AUC from biased PU data. To address the bias, our key idea is to exploit {\it confidence}, i.e., the probability that an instance is positive, associated with the small number of labeled positive data. We derive an estimator of the AUC risk using biased PU data with confidence, enabling AUC maximization under such bias. We further show that the rewritten AUC risk induces a Bayes-optimal AUC ranking even when the available confidence is any strictly increasing transformation of the true posterior probability. We experimentally show the effectiveness of our method on eight real-world datasets.
ER -