Learning Monotonic Transformations for Classification

Abstract

A discriminative method is proposed for learning monotonic transforma- tions of the training data while jointly estimating a large-margin classi(cid:12)er. In many domains such as document classi(cid:12)cation, image histogram classi(cid:12)- cation and gene microarray experiments, (cid:12)xed monotonic transformations can be useful as a preprocessing step. However, most classi(cid:12)ers only explore these transformations through manual trial and error or via prior domain knowledge. The proposed method learns monotonic transformations auto- matically while training a large-margin classi(cid:12)er without any prior knowl- edge of the domain. A monotonic piecewise linear function is learned which transforms data for subsequent processing by a linear hyperplane classi(cid:12)er. Two algorithmic implementations of the method are formalized. The (cid:12)rst solves a convergent alternating sequence of quadratic and linear programs until it obtains a locally optimal solution. An improved algorithm is then derived using a convex semide(cid:12)nite relaxation that overcomes initializa- tion issues in the greedy optimization problem. The e(cid:11)ectiveness of these learned transformations on synthetic problems, text data and image data is demonstrated.

Cite

Text

Howard and Jebara. "Learning Monotonic Transformations for Classification." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2007.

Markdown

[Howard and Jebara. "Learning Monotonic Transformations for Classification." Neural Information Processing Systems, 2007.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2007/howard2007neurips-learning/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{howard2007neurips-learning,
  title     = {{Learning Monotonic Transformations for Classification}},
  author    = {Howard, Andrew and Jebara, Tony},
  booktitle = {Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2007},
  pages     = {681-688},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2007/howard2007neurips-learning/}
}