Learning a combination of heterogeneous dissimilarities from incomplete knowledge

  • Authors:
  • Manuel Martín-Merino

  • Affiliations:
  • Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

  • Venue:
  • ICANN'10 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Artificial neural networks: Part III
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The performance of many pattern recognition algorithms depends strongly on the dissimilarity considered to evaluate the sample proximities. The choice of a good dissimilarity is a difficult task because each one reflects different features of the data. Therefore, different dissimilarities and data sources should be integrated in order to reflect more accurately which is similar for the user and the problem at hand. In many applications, the user feedback or the a priory knowledge about the problem provide pairs of similar and dissimilar examples. This side-information may be used to learn a distance metric that reflects more accurately the sample proximities. In this paper, we address the problem of learning a linear combination of dissimilarities using side information in the form of equivalence constraints. The minimization of the error function is based on a quadratic optimization algorithm. A smoothing term is included that penalizes the complexity of the family of distances and avoids overfitting. The experimental results suggest that the method proposed outperforms a standard metric learning algorithm and improves classification and clustering results based on a single dissimilarity.