For many tasks and data types, there are natural transformations to which the data should be invariant or insensitive. For instance, in visual recognition, natural images should be insensitive to rotation and translation. This requirement and its implications have been important in many machine learning applications, and tolerance for image transformations was primarily achieved by using robust feature vectors. In this paper we propose a novel and computationally efficient way to learn a local Mahalanobis metric per datum, and show how we can learn a local invariant metric to any transformation in order to improve performance.
The exemplar-SVM algorithm @cite_2 can be seen as a local similarity measure. This is obtained by maximizing margins, with a linear model, and is weakly supervised as our work. Unlike exemplar-SVM, we learn a Mahalanobis matrix and can learn an invariant metric. Another related work is PMLM @cite_11 , which also finds a local Mahalanobis metric for each data point. However, this method uses global constraints, and therefore cannot work with weakly supervised data, i.e. a single positive example. All the techniques above do not learn local invariant metrics.
@cite_11 @cite_2
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The accuracy of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification depends significantly on the metric used to compute distances between different examples. In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification from labeled examples. The Mahalanobis metric can equivalently be viewed as a global linear transformation of the input space that precedes kNN classification using Euclidean distances. In our approach, the metric is trained with the goal that the k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are separated by a large margin. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the margin criterion leads to a convex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our approach requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification. In our framework, the Mahalanobis distance metric is obtained as the solution to a semidefinite program. On several data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in this way lead to significant improvements in kNN classification. Sometimes these results can be further improved by clustering the training examples and learning an individual metric within each cluster. We show how to learn and combine these local metrics in a globally integrated manner. This paper introduces a novel classification approach which improves the performance of support vector machines (SVMs) by learning a distance metric. The metric learned is a Mahalanobis metric previously trained so that examples from different classes are separated with a large margin. The learned metric is used to define a kernel function for SVM classification. In this context, the metric can be seen as a linear transformation of the original inputs before applying an SVM classifier that uses Euclidean distances. This transformation increases the separability of classes in the transformed space where the classification is applied. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements in classification tasks on various data sets.