3,445 research outputs found
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
EC3: Combining Clustering and Classification for Ensemble Learning
Classification and clustering algorithms have been proved to be successful
individually in different contexts. Both of them have their own advantages and
limitations. For instance, although classification algorithms are more powerful
than clustering methods in predicting class labels of objects, they do not
perform well when there is a lack of sufficient manually labeled reliable data.
On the other hand, although clustering algorithms do not produce label
information for objects, they provide supplementary constraints (e.g., if two
objects are clustered together, it is more likely that the same label is
assigned to both of them) that one can leverage for label prediction of a set
of unknown objects. Therefore, systematic utilization of both these types of
algorithms together can lead to better prediction performance. In this paper,
We propose a novel algorithm, called EC3 that merges classification and
clustering together in order to support both binary and multi-class
classification. EC3 is based on a principled combination of multiple
classification and multiple clustering methods using an optimization function.
We theoretically show the convexity and optimality of the problem and solve it
by block coordinate descent method. We additionally propose iEC3, a variant of
EC3 that handles imbalanced training data. We perform an extensive experimental
analysis by comparing EC3 and iEC3 with 14 baseline methods (7 well-known
standalone classifiers, 5 ensemble classifiers, and 2 existing methods that
merge classification and clustering) on 13 standard benchmark datasets. We show
that our methods outperform other baselines for every single dataset, achieving
at most 10% higher AUC. Moreover our methods are faster (1.21 times faster than
the best baseline), more resilient to noise and class imbalance than the best
baseline method.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 11 table
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