Non-Euclidean or non-metric measures can be informative

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Abstract

StatisticallearningalgorithmsoftenrelyontheEuclideandistance.Inpractice,non-Euclideanornon-metricdissimilaritymeasuresmayarisewhencontours,spectraorshapesarecomparedbyeditdistancesorasaconsequenceofrobustobjectmatching[1,2].Itisanopenissuewhethersuchmeasuresareadvantageousforstatisticallearningorwhethertheyshouldbeconstrainedtoobeythemetricaxioms.
Thek-nearestneighbor(NN)ruleiswidelyappliedtogeneraldissimilaritydataasthemostnaturalapproach.Alternativemethodsexistthatembedsuchdataintosuitablerepresentationspacesinwhichstatisticalclassi¿ersareconstructed[3].Inthispaper,weinvestigatetherelationbetweennon-Euclideanaspectsofdissimilaritydataandtheclassi¿cationperformanceofthedirectNNruleandsomeclassi¿erstrainedinrepresentationspaces.Thisisevaluatedonaparameterizedfamilyofeditdistances,inwhichparametervaluescontrolthestrengthofnon-Euclideanbehavior.Our¿ndingisthatthediscriminativepowerofthismeasureincreaseswithincreasingnon-Euclideanandnon-metricaspectsuntilacertainoptimumisreached.Theconclusionisthatstatisticalclassi¿ersperformwellandtheoptimalvaluesoftheparameterscharacterizeanon-Euclideanandsomewhatnon-metricmeasure