Positive-unlabeled learning for disease gene identification

Identifying disease genes from human genome is an important but challenging task in biomedical research. Machine learning methods can be applied to discover new disease genes based on the known ones. Existing machine learning methods typically use the known disease genes as the positive training set P and the unknown genes as the negative training set N (non-disease gene set does not exist) to build classifiers to identify new disease genes from the unknown genes. However, such kind of classifiers is actually built from a noisy negative set N as there can be unknown disease genes in N itself. As a result, the classifiers do not perform as well as they could be.