To classify time series by nearest neighbors, we need to specify or learn one or several distance measures. We consider variations of the Mahalanobis distance measures which rely on the inverse covariance matrix of the data. Unfortunately--for time series data--the covariance matrix has often low rank. To alleviate this problem we can either use a pseudoinverse, covariance shrinking or limit the matrix to its diagonal. We review these alternatives and benchmark them against competitive methods such as the related Large Margin Nearest Neighbor Classification (LMNN) and the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance. As we expected, we find that the DTW is superior, but the Mahalanobis distance measures are one to two orders of magnitude faster. To get best results with Mahalanobis distance measures, we recommend learning one distance measure per class using either covariance shrinking or the diagonal approach.
More generally, distance metric learning has an extensive literature . We refer the reader to @cite_6 for a review. A conventional distance-learning approach is to find an optimal generalized ellipsoid distance with respect to a specific loss function. The LMNN algorithm proposed by @cite_6 takes a different approach. It seeks to force nearest neighbors to belong to the same class and it separates instances from different classes by a large margin. LMNN can be formulated as a semi-definite programming problem. They also propose a modification which they call multiple metrics LMNN as it learns different distances for each class.
@cite_6
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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.