Title
Dissimilarity learning for nominal data
Abstract
Defining a good distance (dissimilarity) measure between patterns is of crucial importance in many classification and clustering algorithms. While a lot of work has been performed on continuous attributes, nominal attributes are more difficult to handle. A popular approach is to use the value difference metric (VDM) to define a real-valued distance measure on nominal values. However, VDM treats the attributes separately and ignores any possible interactions among attributes. In this paper, we propose the use of adaptive dissimilarity matrices for measuring the dissimilarities between nominal values. These matrices are learned via optimizing an error function on the training samples. Experimental results show that this approach leads to better classification performance. Moreover, it also allows easier interpretation of (dis)similarity between different nominal values.
Year
DOI
Venue
2004
10.1016/j.patcog.2003.12.015
Pattern Recognition
Keywords
Field
DocType
Nominal attributes,Pattern classification,Dissimilarities,Distance measure,Classifiers
Error function,Data mining,Pattern recognition,Matrix (mathematics),Artificial intelligence,Cluster analysis,Machine learning,Mathematics,Real versus nominal value
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37
7
0031-3203
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
27
1.11
8
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Victor Cheng1271.11
Chunhung Li21379.71
James T. Kwok34920312.83
Chi-Kwong Li431329.81