A k-Nearest Neighbor Based Multi-Instance Multi-Label Learning Algorithm

In multi-instance multi-label learning (i.e. MIML), each example is not only represented by multiple instances but also associated with multiple labels. Most existing algorithms solve MIML problem via the intuitive way of identifying its equivalence in degenerated version of MIML. However, this identification process may lose useful information encoded in training examples and therefore be harmful to the learning algorithm's performance. In this paper, a novel algorithm named MIML-kNN is proposed for MIML by utilizing the popular k-nearest neighbor techniques. Given a test example, MIML-kNN not only considers its neighbors, but also considers its citers which regard it as their own neighbors. The label set of the test example is determined by exploiting the labeling information conveyed by its neighbors and citers. Experiments on two real-world MIML tasks, i.e. scene classification and text categorization, show that MIML-kNN achieves superior performance than some existing MIML algorithms.