Graph positive-unlabeled learning via Bootstrapping Label Disambiguation

No Thumbnail Available
File version
Author(s)
Liang, Chunquan
Wang, Luyue
Feng, Xinyuan
Cheng, Yuying
Li, Mei
Pan, Shirui
Zhang, Hongming
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
2025
Size
File type(s)
Location
License
Abstract

Graph positive-unlabeled learning is an important task that tries to learn binary classification models from only positive and unlabeled (PU) nodes. While state-of-the-art methods focus on training graph neural networks, they frequently rely on weak objective functions derived solely from a given class prior probability or inferred exclusively from the graph structure, leading their performance significantly lags behind that of fully labeled counterparts. In this paper, we fill this gap by treating unlabeled nodes as samples ambiguously labeled as both positive and negative, and by introducing a learning method called Bootstrap Label Disambiguation (BLD), which progressively resolves label ambiguities during the training of binary classifiers. BLD comprises a node representation learning module via bootstrapping and a novel central region-based label disambiguation strategy. The learning module leverages both previous representations and the derived positive centriod as targets to train positive-aligned representations, eliminating the need for a prior. Consequently, the disambiguation strategy constructs a central-region to identify ambiguous nodes and steadily transforms them into effective supervision. Extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets show that our BLD method significantly outperforms existing approaches and in many cases even surpasses fully labeled classification models. The source code is available at https://github.com/yunyun85/BLD.

Journal Title

Neural Networks

Conference Title
Book Title
Edition
Volume

190

Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement
Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Neural networks

Artificial intelligence

Machine learning

Statistics

Persistent link to this record
Citation

Liang, C; Wang, L; Feng, X; Cheng, Y; Li, M; Pan, S; Zhang, H, Graph positive-unlabeled learning via Bootstrapping Label Disambiguation, Neural Networks, 2025, 190, pp. 107630

Collections