Deep multi-class learning from label proportions

The standard setting of supervised classification in machine learning assumes that we have access to a training set of samples and to their labels; our goal is then to estimate a classifier able to predict the label of new samples. In many real-world situations, however, collecting training sets of labeled examples is not possible, and alternative learning scenarios must be considered. We focus in this paper on a particular setting where one has access to bags of examples, and where for each bag only the proportions of the labels in the bag are available; the task is still to learn a classifier to predict the label of individual samples. This setting, which following Yu et al. [2013] we refer to as learning from label proportions (LLP), is relevant in many situations where labeling of individual samples is time-consuming, difficult, or just not possible, while side-channel information can be used to reconstruct the proportions of label within a given bag. For example, Musicant et al. [2007] explain how LLP is a natural setting to analyze single particle mass spectrometry data, while Quadrianto et al. [2009] discuss applications in e-commerce, politics or spam filtering.