Year: 2016
Type: preprint
Abstract: Learning a good distance metric in feature space potentially improves the performance of the KNN classifier and is useful in many real-world applications. Many metric learning algorithms are however based on the point estimation of a quadratic optimization problem, which is time-consuming, susceptible to overfitting, and lack a natural mechanism to reason with parameter uncertainty, an important property useful especially when the training set is small and/or noisy. To deal with these issues, we present a novel Bayesian metric learning method, called Bayesian NCA, based on the well-known Neighbourhood Component Analysis method, in which the metric posterior is characterized by the local label consistency constraints of observations, encoded with a similarity graph instead of independent pairwise constraints. For efficient Bayesian optimization, we explore the variational lower bound over the log-likelihood of the original NCA objective. Experiments on several publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is able to learn robust metric measures from small size dataset and/or from challenging training set with labels contaminated by errors. The proposed method is also shown to outperform a previous pairwise constrained Bayesian metric learning method.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Wang, Dong, Tan, Xiaoyang
Institution: Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2338824513