  In this work, we consider the task of classifying binary positive-unlabeled
(PU) data. The existing discriminative learning based PU models attempt to seek
an optimal reweighting strategy for U data, so that a decent decision boundary
can be found. However, given limited P data, the conventional PU models tend to
suffer from overfitting when adapted to very flexible deep neural networks. In
contrast, we are the first to innovate a totally new paradigm to attack the
binary PU task, from perspective of generative learning by leveraging the
powerful generative adversarial networks (GAN). Our generative
positive-unlabeled (GenPU) framework incorporates an array of discriminators
and generators that are endowed with different roles in simultaneously
producing positive and negative realistic samples. We provide theoretical
analysis to justify that, at equilibrium, GenPU is capable of recovering both
positive and negative data distributions. Moreover, we show GenPU is
generalizable and closely related to the semi-supervised classification. Given
rather limited P data, experiments on both synthetic and real-world dataset
demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. With infinite
realistic and diverse sample streams generated from GenPU, a very flexible
classifier can then be trained using deep neural networks.
