Non-Euclidean dissimilarities: causes and informativeness

  • Authors:
  • Robert P. W. Duin;Elżbieta Pękalska

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands;School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • SSPR&SPR'10 Proceedings of the 2010 joint IAPR international conference on Structural, syntactic, and statistical pattern recognition
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

In the process of designing pattern recognition systems one may choose a representation based on pairwise dissimilarities between objects. This is especially appealing when a set of discriminative features is difficult to find. Various classification systems have been studied for such a dissimilarity representation: the direct use of the nearest neighbor rule, the postulation of a dissimilarity space and an embedding to a virtual, underlying feature vector space. It appears in several applications that the dissimilarity measures constructed by experts tend to have a non-Euclidean behavior. In this paper we first analyze the causes of such choices and then experimentally verify that the non-Euclidean property of the measure can be informative.