Distance Metric Learning, With Application To Clustering With Side-Information-英文文献.pdf

Distance metric learning, with application to clustering with side-information Eric P. Xing, Andrew Y. Ng, Michael I. Jordan and Stuart Russell University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720 fepxing,ang,jordan,russellg @cs.berkeley.edu Abstract Many algorithms rely critically on being given a good metric over their inputs. For instance, data can often be clustered in many “plausible” ways, and if a clustering algorithm such as K-means initially fails to find one that is meaningful to a user, the only recourse may be for the user to manually tweak the metric until sufficiently good clusters are found. For these and other applications requiring good metrics, it is desirable that we provide a more systematic way for users to indicate what they con- sider “similar.” For instance, we may ask them to provide examples. In this paper, we present an algorithm that, given examples of similar (and, if desired, dissimilar) pairs of points in Rn , learns a distance metric over Rn that respects these relationships. Our method is based on posing met- ric learning as a convex optimization problem, which allows us to give efficient, local-optima-free algorithms. We also demonstrate empirically that the learned metrics can be used to significantly improve clustering performance. 1 Introduction The performance of many learning and datamining algorithms depend critically on their being given a good metric over the input space. For instance, K-means, nearest-neighbors classifiers and kernel algorithms such as SVMs all need to be given good metrics that reflect reasonably well the important relationships between the data. This proble