PE-PUC: A graph based PU-learning approach for text classification

Abstract

This paper presents a novel solution for the problem of building text classifier using positive documents (P) and unlabeled documents (U). Here, the unlabeled documents are mixed with positive and negative documents. This problem is also called PU-Learning. The key feature of PU-Learning is that there is no negative document for training. Recently, several approaches have been proposed for solving this problem. Most of them are based on the same idea, which builds a classifier in two steps. Each existing technique uses a different method for each step. Generally speaking, these existing approaches do not perform well when the size of P is small. In this paper, we propose a new approach aiming at improving the system when the size of P is small. This approach combines the graph-based semi-supervised learning method with the two-step method. Experiments indicate that our proposed method performs well especially when the size of P is small. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.