Adaptive Metric Learning for Dimensionality Reduction

Finding a suitable space is one of the most critical problems for dimensionality reduction. Each space corresponds to a distance metric defined on the sample attributes, and thus finding a suitable space can be converted to develop an effective distance metric. Most existing dimensionality reduction methods use a fixed pre-specified distance metric. However, this easy treatment has some limitations in practice due to the fact the pre-specified metric is not going to warranty that the closest samples are the truly similar ones. In this paper, we present an adaptive metric learning method for dimensionality reduction, called AML. The adaptive metric learning model is developed by maximizing the difference of the distances between the data pairs in cannot-links and those in must-links. Different from many existing papers that use the traditional Euclidean distance, we use the more generalized l2,p-norm distance to reduce sensitivity to noise and outliers, which incorporates additional flexibility and adaptability due to the selection of appropriate p-values for different data sets. Moreover, considering traditional metric learning methods usually project samples into a linear subspace, which is overstrict. We extend the basic linear method to a more powerful nonlinear kernel case so that well capturing complex nonlinear relationship between data. To solve our objective, we have derived an efficient iterative algorithm. Extensive experiments for dimensionality reduction are provided to demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches.