Sure: Screening Unlabeled Samples for Reliable Negative Samples Based on Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

For many classification tasks, only experimentally validated positive samples are available, and experimentally validated negative samples are not recorded. The lack of negative samples poses a great challenge for using supervised machine learning. To address this problem, we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning based model to screen reliable negative samples from unlabeled samples, named SURE. SURE has two modules: sample selector and sample inspector. The sample selector screens reliable negative samples from unlabeled samples by two reinforcement strategies. The sample inspector classifies samples and provides rewards to the sample selector. In this paper, we focus on one popular issue in the field of bioinformatics: the ncRNA-protein interaction (NPI) prediction task, which lacks reliable negative samples. Thirty datasets for NPI prediction are used to test the screening effect of SURE. The Experimental results show that our model has a robust negative sample screening capability and is superior to all outstanding sample screening methods used in the NPI prediction task. In addition, we refine 5 NPI datasets containing reliable negative samples screened by SURE, and a webserver (www.csbg-jlu.info/sure) is available offering the NPI prediction refined by SURE.

Keywords: negative sample screening, Deep reinforcement learning, ncRNA-protein interaction