# MMIL: A novel algorithm for disease associated cell type discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.08322 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08322/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Multiple Instance Learning: A Survey of Problem Characteristics and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03365/) (2016)
- [Multiple Instance Learning for Digital Pathology: A Review on the State-of-the-Art, Limitations & Future Potential](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04425/) (2022)
- [Active label cleaning for improved dataset quality under resource constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00574/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Single-cell datasets often lack individual cell labels, making it challenging to identify cells associated with disease. To address this, we introduce Mixture Modeling for Multiple Instance Learning (MMIL), an expectation maximization method that enables the training and calibration of cell-level classifiers using patient-level labels. Our approach can be used to train e.g. lasso logistic regression models, gradient boosted trees, and neural networks. When applied to clinically-annotated, primary patient samples in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), our method accurately identifies cancer cells, generalizes across tissues and treatment timepoints, and selects biologically relevant features. In addition, MMIL is capable of incorporating cell labels into model training when they are known, providing a powerful framework for leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data simultaneously. Mixture Modeling for MIL offers a novel approach for cell classification, with significant potential to advance disease understanding and management, especially in scenarios with unknown gold-standard labels and high dimensionality.