A Note on Learning from Multiple-Instance Examples

Abstract

We describe a simple reduction from the problem of PAC-learning from multiple-instance examples to that of PAC-learning with one-sided random classification noise. Thus, all concept classes learnable with one-sided noise, which includes all concepts learnable in the usual 2-sided random noise model plus others such as the parity function, are learnable from multiple-instance examples. We also describe a more efficient (and somewhat technically more involved) reduction to the Statistical-Query model that results in a polynomial-time algorithm for learning axis-parallel rectangles with sample complexity Õ(d 2 r/ε 2 ) , saving roughly a factor of r over the results of Auer et al. (1997).