Scalable Multi-instance Learning

Multi-instance learning (MIL) has been widely applied to diverse applications involving complicated data objects such as images and genes. However, most existing MIL algorithms can only handle small-or moderate-sized data. In order to deal with the large scale problems in MIL, we propose an efficient and scalable MIL algorithm named miFV. Our algorithm maps the original MIL bags into a new feature vector representation, which can obtain bag-level information, and meanwhile lead to excellent performances even with linear classifiers. In consequence, thanks to the low computational cost in the mapping step and the scalability of linear classifiers, miFV can handle large scale MIL data efficiently and effectively. Experiments show that miFV not only achieves comparable accuracy rates with state-of-the-art MIL algorithms, but has hundreds of times faster speed than other MIL algorithms.