Positive Semidefinite Metric Learning Using Boosting-like Algorithms

The success of many machine learning and pattern recognition methods relies heavily upon the identification of an appropriate distance metric on the input data. It is often beneficial to learn such a metric from the input training data, instead of using a default one such as the Euclidean distance. In this work, we propose a boosting-based technique, termed BoostMetric, for learning a quadratic Mahalanobis distance metric. Learning a valid Mahalanobis distance metric requires enforcing the constraint that the matrix parameter to the metric remains positive definite. Semidefinite programming is often used to enforce this constraint, but does not scale well and easy to implement. BoostMetric is instead based on the observation that any positive semidefinite matrix can be decomposed into a linear combination of trace-one rank-one matrices. BoostMetric thus uses rank-one positive semidefinite matrices as weak learners within an efficient and scalable boosting-based learning process. The resulting methods are easy to implement, efficient, and can accommodate various types of constraints. We extend traditional boosting algorithms in that its weak learner is a positive semidefinite matrix with trace and rank being one rather than a classifier or regressor. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms compare favorably to those state-of-the-art methods in terms of classification accuracy and running time.Comment: 30 pages, appearing in Journal of Machine Learning Researc

Linear discriminant analysis for the small sample size problem: an overview

Dimensionality reduction is an important aspect in the pattern classification literature, and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is one of the most widely studied dimensionality reduction technique. The application of variants of LDA technique for solving small sample size (SSS) problem can be found in many research areas e.g. face recognition, bioinformatics, text recognition, etc. The improvement of the performance of variants of LDA technique has great potential in various fields of research. In this paper, we present an overview of these methods. We covered the type, characteristics and taxonomy of these methods which can overcome SSS problem. We have also highlighted some important datasets and software/packages

A deterministic approach to regularized linear discriminant analysis

The regularized linear discriminant analysis (RLDA) technique is one of the popular methods for dimensionality reduction used for small sample size problems. In this technique, regularization parameter is conventionally computed using a cross-validation procedure. In this paper, we propose a deterministic way of computing the regularization parameter in RLDA for small sample size problem. The computational cost of the proposed deterministic RLDA is significantly less than the cross-validation based RLDA technique. The deterministic RLDA technique is also compared with other popular techniques on a number of datasets and favorable results are obtained