Multiple Instance Learning

This chapter provides a general introduction to the main subject matter of this work: multiple instance or multi-instance learning. The two terms are used interchangeably in the literature and they both convey the crucial point of difference with traditional (single-instance) learning. A formal description of multiple instance learning is provided in Sect. 2.1 and we discuss its origins in Sect. 2.2. In Sect. 2.3, we describe different learning tasks within this domain, which may or may not have an equivalent in single-instance learning. Finally, Sect. 2.4 lists a wide variety of applications corresponding to the different multi-instance learning paradigms.