A Novel Neural Network-Based Approach for Multiple Instance Learning

This paper proposes a new multiple instance learning (MIL) method based on a MIL back-propagation neural network (MIBP), which is an extension of the standard back-propagation neural network (BPNN) that uses labeled bags of instances as training data. The method finds a concept point t in the feature space which is close to instances from positive bags and far from instances in negative bags. Our method is as follows: First, train MIBP with positive and negative bags. Second, extract t from the trained MIBP. This is achieved by, for each positive bag, presenting all the instances to the trained MIBP and selecting the one with maximal output value. The t is then obtained by averaging all the extracted instances. Finally, a sensitivity analysis of the trained MIBP is performed to obtain feature relevance/weighting information. We conducted experiments to measure the performance of the obtained t when used for classification purposes. The experimental results on the musk data set and a subset of the Corel image data set show that our method has better classification performance and is more computationally efficient than other well-established MIL methods.