19 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
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
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
An Efficient Dual Approach to Distance Metric Learning
Distance metric learning is of fundamental interest in machine learning
because the distance metric employed can significantly affect the performance
of many learning methods. Quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning is a popular
approach to the problem, but typically requires solving a semidefinite
programming (SDP) problem, which is computationally expensive. Standard
interior-point SDP solvers typically have a complexity of (with
the dimension of input data), and can thus only practically solve problems
exhibiting less than a few thousand variables. Since the number of variables is
, this implies a limit upon the size of problem that can
practically be solved of around a few hundred dimensions. The complexity of the
popular quadratic Mahalanobis metric learning approach thus limits the size of
problem to which metric learning can be applied. Here we propose a
significantly more efficient approach to the metric learning problem based on
the Lagrange dual formulation of the problem. The proposed formulation is much
simpler to implement, and therefore allows much larger Mahalanobis metric
learning problems to be solved. The time complexity of the proposed method is
, which is significantly lower than that of the SDP approach.
Experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that the proposed method
achieves an accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art, but is applicable to
significantly larger problems. We also show that the proposed method can be
applied to solve more general Frobenius-norm regularized SDP problems
approximately
Worst-Case Linear Discriminant Analysis as Scalable Semidefinite Feasibility Problems
In this paper, we propose an efficient semidefinite programming (SDP)
approach to worst-case linear discriminant analysis (WLDA). Compared with the
traditional LDA, WLDA considers the dimensionality reduction problem from the
worst-case viewpoint, which is in general more robust for classification.
However, the original problem of WLDA is non-convex and difficult to optimize.
In this paper, we reformulate the optimization problem of WLDA into a sequence
of semidefinite feasibility problems. To efficiently solve the semidefinite
feasibility problems, we design a new scalable optimization method with
quasi-Newton methods and eigen-decomposition being the core components. The
proposed method is orders of magnitude faster than standard interior-point
based SDP solvers.
Experiments on a variety of classification problems demonstrate that our
approach achieves better performance than standard LDA. Our method is also much
faster and more scalable than standard interior-point SDP solvers based WLDA.
The computational complexity for an SDP with constraints and matrices of
size by is roughly reduced from to
( in our case).Comment: 14 page