Logistic Regression and Boosting for Labeled Bags of Instances

In this paper we upgrade linear logistic regression and boosting to multi-instance data, where each example consists of a labeled bag of instances. This is done by connecting predictions for individual instances to a bag-level probability estimate by simple averaging and maximizing the likelihood at the bag level—in other words, by assuming that all instances contribute equally and independently to a bag’s label. We present empirical results for artificial data generated according to the underlying generative model that we assume, and also show that the two algorithms produce competitive results on the Musk benchmark datasets.