15 research outputs found
Two-Stage Metric Learning
In this paper, we present a novel two-stage metric learning algorithm. We
first map each learning instance to a probability distribution by computing its
similarities to a set of fixed anchor points. Then, we define the distance in
the input data space as the Fisher information distance on the associated
statistical manifold. This induces in the input data space a new family of
distance metric with unique properties. Unlike kernelized metric learning, we
do not require the similarity measure to be positive semi-definite. Moreover,
it can also be interpreted as a local metric learning algorithm with well
defined distance approximation. We evaluate its performance on a number of
datasets. It outperforms significantly other metric learning methods and SVM.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICML 201
Data-Driven Supervised Learning for Life Science Data
Life science data are often encoded in a non-standard way by means of alpha-numeric sequences, graph representations, numerical vectors of variable length, or other formats. Domain-specific or data-driven similarity measures like alignment functions have been employed with great success. The vast majority of more complex data analysis algorithms require fixed-length vectorial input data, asking for substantial preprocessing of life science data. Data-driven measures are widely ignored in favor of simple encodings. These preprocessing steps are not always easy to perform nor particularly effective, with a potential loss of information and interpretability. We present some strategies and concepts of how to employ data-driven similarity measures in the life science context and other complex biological systems. In particular, we show how to use data-driven similarity measures effectively in standard learning algorithms