Twin Support Vector Machine for Multiple Instance Learning Based on Bag Dissimilarities

Abstract

In multiple instance learning (MIL) framework, an object is represented by a set of instances referred to as bag. A positive class label is assigned to a bag if it contains at least one positive instance; otherwise a bag is labeled with negative class label. Therefore, the task of MIL is to learn a classifier at bag level rather than at instance level. Traditional supervised learning approaches cannot be applied directly in such kind of situation. In this study, we represent each bag by a vector of its dissimilarities to the other existing bags in the training dataset and propose a multiple instance learning based Twin Support Vector Machine (MIL-TWSVM) classifier. We have used different ways to represent the dissimilarity between two bags and performed a comparative analysis of them. The experimental results on ten benchmark MIL datasets demonstrate that the proposed MIL-TWSVM classifier is computationally inexpensive and competitive with state-of-the-art approaches. The significance of the experimental results has been tested by using Friedman statistic and Nemenyi post hoc tests.