  We present a comprehensive study of the use of generative modeling approaches
for Multiple-Instance Learning (MIL) problems. In MIL a learner receives
training instances grouped together into bags with labels for the bags only
(which might not be correct for the comprised instances). Our work was
motivated by the task of facilitating the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders
using sets of motor unit potential trains (MUPTs) detected within a muscle
which can be cast as a MIL problem. Our approach leads to a state-of-the-art
solution to the problem of muscle classification. By introducing and analyzing
generative models for MIL in a general framework and examining a variety of
model structures and components, our work also serves as a methodological guide
to modelling MIL tasks. We evaluate our proposed methods both on MUPT datasets
and on the MUSK1 dataset, one of the most widely used benchmarks for MIL.
