Feature selection in multi-instance learning

Multi-instance learning was first proposed by Dietterich et al. (Artificial Intelligence 89(1–2):31–71, 1997) when they were investigating the problem of drug activity prediction. Here, the training set is composed of labeled bags, each of which consists of many unlabeled instances. And the goal of this learning framework is to learn some classifier from the training set for correctly labeling unseen bags. After Dietterich et al., many studies about this new learning framework have been started and many new algorithms have been proposed, for example, DD, EM-DD, Citation-kNN and so on. All of these algorithms are working on the full data set. But as in single-instance learning, different feature in training set has different effect on the training about classifier. In this paper, we will study the problem about feature selection in multi-instance learning. We will extend the data reliability measure and make it select the key feature in multi-instance scenario.