Learning Probabilistic Kernel from Latent Dirichlet Allocation.

Measuring the similarity of given samples is a key problem of recognition, clustering, retrieval and related applications. A number of works, e.g. kernel method and metric learning, have been contributed to this problem. The challenge of similarity learning is to find a similarity robust to intra-class variance and simultaneously selective to inter-class characteristic. We observed that, the similarity measure can be improved if the data distribution and hidden semantic information are exploited in a more sophisticated way. In this paper, we propose a similarity learning approach for retrieval and recognition. The approach, termed as LDA-FEK, derives free energy kernel (FEK) from Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). First, it trains LDA and constructs kernel using the parameters and variables of the trained model. Then, the unknown kernel parameters are learned by a discriminative learning approach. The main contributions of the proposed method are twofold: (1) the method is computationally efficient and scalable since the parameters in kernel are determined in a staged way; (2) the method exploits data distribution and semantic level hidden information by means of LDA. To evaluate the performance of LDA-FEK, we apply it for image retrieval over two data sets and for text categorization on four popular data sets. The results show the competitive performance of our method.