AI seminar: Distance metric learning versus Fisher discriminant analysis

Speaker: Babak Alipanahi

There has been much recent attention to the problem of learning an appropriate distance metric, using class labels or other side information. Some proposed algorithms are iterative and computationally expensive. In this talk, we show how to solve one of these methods with a closed-form solution, rather than using semi-definite programming. We provide a new problem setup in which the algorithm performs better or as well as some standard methods, but without the computational complexity. Furthermore, we show a strong relationship between these methods and the Fisher Discriminant Analysis.