EM-DD: An Improved Multiple-Instance Learning Technique

We present a new multiple-instance (MI) learning technique (EMDD) that combines EM with the diverse density (DD) algorithm. EM-DD is a general-purpose MI algorithm that can be applied with boolean or real-value labels and makes real-value predictions. On the boolean Musk benchmarks, the EM-DD algorithm without any tuning significantly outperforms all previous algorithms. EM-DD is relatively insensitive to the number of relevant attributes in the data set and scales up well to large bag sizes. Furthermore, EMDD provides a new framework for MI learning, in which the MI problem is converted to a single-instance setting by using EM to estimate the instance responsible for the label of the bag.