15,805 research outputs found
Similarity Learning for Provably Accurate Sparse Linear Classification
In recent years, the crucial importance of metrics in machine learning
algorithms has led to an increasing interest for optimizing distance and
similarity functions. Most of the state of the art focus on learning
Mahalanobis distances (requiring to fulfill a constraint of positive
semi-definiteness) for use in a local k-NN algorithm. However, no theoretical
link is established between the learned metrics and their performance in
classification. In this paper, we make use of the formal framework of good
similarities introduced by Balcan et al. to design an algorithm for learning a
non PSD linear similarity optimized in a nonlinear feature space, which is then
used to build a global linear classifier. We show that our approach has uniform
stability and derive a generalization bound on the classification error.
Experiments performed on various datasets confirm the effectiveness of our
approach compared to state-of-the-art methods and provide evidence that (i) it
is fast, (ii) robust to overfitting and (iii) produces very sparse classifiers.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2012
Similarity Learning for High-Dimensional Sparse Data
A good measure of similarity between data points is crucial to many tasks in
machine learning. Similarity and metric learning methods learn such measures
automatically from data, but they do not scale well respect to the
dimensionality of the data. In this paper, we propose a method that can learn
efficiently similarity measure from high-dimensional sparse data. The core idea
is to parameterize the similarity measure as a convex combination of rank-one
matrices with specific sparsity structures. The parameters are then optimized
with an approximate Frank-Wolfe procedure to maximally satisfy relative
similarity constraints on the training data. Our algorithm greedily
incorporates one pair of features at a time into the similarity measure,
providing an efficient way to control the number of active features and thus
reduce overfitting. It enjoys very appealing convergence guarantees and its
time and memory complexity depends on the sparsity of the data instead of the
dimension of the feature space. Our experiments on real-world high-dimensional
datasets demonstrate its potential for classification, dimensionality reduction
and data exploration.Comment: 14 pages. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2015). Matlab code:
https://github.com/bellet/HDS
A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data
The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between
data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining,
but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally
difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at
automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest
in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey
paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature,
highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to
Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework,
but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as
powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning
and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as
semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the
derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey
addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance
learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in
metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved
presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new
method
Parametric Local Metric Learning for Nearest Neighbor Classification
We study the problem of learning local metrics for nearest neighbor
classification. Most previous works on local metric learning learn a number of
local unrelated metrics. While this "independence" approach delivers an
increased flexibility its downside is the considerable risk of overfitting. We
present a new parametric local metric learning method in which we learn a
smooth metric matrix function over the data manifold. Using an approximation
error bound of the metric matrix function we learn local metrics as linear
combinations of basis metrics defined on anchor points over different regions
of the instance space. We constrain the metric matrix function by imposing on
the linear combinations manifold regularization which makes the learned metric
matrix function vary smoothly along the geodesics of the data manifold. Our
metric learning method has excellent performance both in terms of predictive
power and scalability. We experimented with several large-scale classification
problems, tens of thousands of instances, and compared it with several state of
the art metric learning methods, both global and local, as well as to SVM with
automatic kernel selection, all of which it outperforms in a significant
manner
Efficient learning of neighbor representations for boundary trees and forests
We introduce a semiparametric approach to neighbor-based classification. We
build off the recently proposed Boundary Trees algorithm by Mathy et al.(2015)
which enables fast neighbor-based classification, regression and retrieval in
large datasets. While boundary trees use an Euclidean measure of similarity,
the Differentiable Boundary Tree algorithm by Zoran et al.(2017) was introduced
to learn low-dimensional representations of complex input data, on which
semantic similarity can be calculated to train boundary trees. As is pointed
out by its authors, the differentiable boundary tree approach contains a few
limitations that prevents it from scaling to large datasets. In this paper, we
introduce Differentiable Boundary Sets, an algorithm that overcomes the
computational issues of the differentiable boundary tree scheme and also
improves its classification accuracy and data representability. Our algorithm
is efficiently implementable with existing tools and offers a significant
reduction in training time. We test and compare the algorithms on the well
known MNIST handwritten digits dataset and the newer Fashion-MNIST dataset by
Xiao et al.(2017).Comment: 9 pages, 2 figure
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