Similar Pair-free Partial Label Metric Learning

Abstract

Partial label learning is a new weak- ly supervised learning framework. In this frame- work, the real category label of a training sample is usually concealed in a set of candidate labels, which will lead to lower accuracy of learning al- gorithms compared with traditional strong super- vised cases. Recently, it has been found that met- ric learning technology can be used to improve the accuracy of partial label learning algorithm- s. However, because it is difficult to ascertain similar pairs from training samples, at present there are few metric learning algorithms for par- tial label learning framework. In view of this, this paper proposes a similar pair-free partial la- bel metric learning algorithm. The main idea of the algorithm is to define two probability distri- butions on the training samples, i.e., the proba- bility distribution determined by the distance of sample pairs and the probability distribution de- termined by the similarity of candidate label set of sample pairs, and then the metric matrix is ob- tained via minimizing the KL divergence of the two probability distributions. The experimental results on several real-world partial label dataset- s show that the proposed algorithm can improve the accuracy of k-nearest neighbor partial label learning algorithm (PL-KNN) better than the ex- isting partial label metric learning algorithms, up to 8 percentage points.