Parameter-Free Basis Allocation for Efficient Multiple Metric Learning

Abstract Metric learning involves learning a metric function for distance measurement, which plays an important role in improving the performance of classification or similarity-based algorithms. Multiple metric learning is essential for efficiently reflecting the local properties between instances, as single metric learning has limitations in reflecting the nonlinear structure of complex datasets. Previous research has proposed a method for learning a smooth metric matrix function through data manifold to address the challenge of independently learning multiple metrics. However, this method uses the basic distance-based clustering algorithm to set the anchor points, which are the basis for local metric learning, and the number of basis metrics is dependent on the user. We propose a new method that can assign sophisticated anchor points by iteratively partitioning to identify mixed clusters of multi-class instances and cluster the most similar class instances together. In an experiment, we demonstrate the reliability of the automatically set parameter by comparison with the distribution of error rates according to the number of basis metrics of the existing algorithm. Furthermore, we show the superior performance of the proposed method over a fixed parameter setting of existing algorithms and confirm the relative classification accuracy superiority through performance comparison with baseline algorithms.