Binary Classification from Coupled Pairwise Labels

Abstract:Even when it is difficult to assign absolute class labels to individual instances, relational information may still be available, such as whether two instances belong to the same class or which instance is more likely to belong to the positive class. In this study, we refer to these two types of information as Similarity/Dissimilarity (SD) labels and Pairwise Comparison (Pcomp) labels, respectively, and consider binary classification that uses both types of relational information from the same instance pairs. SD learning uses the distinction between similar and dissimilar pairs but does not use the ordering within each pair, whereas Pcomp learning uses the ordering within each pair but does not distinguish between similar and dissimilar pairs. We therefore propose SD-Pcomp learning, whose objective function simultaneously preserves the structures of both SD learning and Pcomp learning. The proposed objective function admits two decompositions: one consists of an SD estimator plus a term that represents ordering information from Pcomp labels, and the other consists of a Pcomp estimator plus a term that represents pair-type information from SD labels. These decompositions clarify how the complementary information provided by SD and Pcomp labels is integrated into the proposed objective function. Experiments on eight datasets compare the proposed method with SD learning, Pcomp learning, and a method that takes a convex combination of their objective functions. We evaluate the effect of using both types of relational information on classification performance in terms of classification accuracy and AUC.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2603.19713 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2603.19713v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.19713 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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