The multiple-instance problem is a difficult machine learning problem that appears in cases where knowledge about training examples is incomplete. In this problem, the teacher labels examples that are sets (also called bags) of instances. The teacher does not label whether an individual instance in a bag is positive or negative. The learning algorithm needs to generate a classifier that will correctly classify unseen examples (i.e., bags of instances). This learning framework is receiving growing attention in the machine learning community and since it was introduced by Dietterich, Lathrop, Lozano-Perez (1997), a wide range of tasks have been formulated as multi-instance problems. Among these tasks, we can cite content-based image retrieval (Chen, Bi, & Wang, 2006) and annotation (Qi and Han, 2007), text categorization (Andrews, Tsochantaridis, & Hofmann, 2002), web index page recommendation (Zhou, Jiang, & Li, 2005; Xue, Han, Jiang, & Zhou, 2007) and drug activity prediction (Dietterich et al., 1997; Zhou & Zhang, 2007). In this chapter we introduce MOG3P-MI, a multiobjective grammar guided genetic programming algorithm to handle multi-instance problems. In this algorithm, based on SPEA2, individuals represent classification rules which make it possible to determine if a bag is positive or negative. The quality of each individual is evaluated according to two quality indexes: sensitivity and specificity. Both these measures have been adapted to MIL circumstances. Computational experiments show that the MOG3P-MI is a robust algorithm for classification in different domains where achieves competitive results and obtain classifiers which contain simple rules which add comprehensibility and simplicity in the knowledge discovery process, being suitable method for solving MIL problems (Zafra & Ventura, 2007).
A Genetic-Programming-Based Approach for the Learning of Compact Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems