On the relation between multi-instance learning and semi-supervised learning

Multi-instance learning and semi-supervised learning are different branches of machine learning. The former attempts to learn from a training set consists of labeled bags each containing many unlabeled instances; the latter tries to exploit abundant unlabeled instances when learning with a small number of labeled examples. In this paper, we establish a bridge between these two branches by showing that multi-instance learning can be viewed as a special case of semi-supervised learning. Based on this recognition, we propose the MissSVM algorithm which addresses multi-instance learning using a special semi-supervised support vector machine. Experiments show that solving multi-instance problems from the view of semi-supervised learning is feasible, and the MissSVM algorithm is competitive with state-of-the-art multi-instance learning algorithms.