Metric learning with relative distance constraints : a modified SVM approach

Distance metric learning plays an important role in many machine learning tasks. In this paper, we propose a method for learning a Mahanalobis distance metric. By formulating the metric learning problem with relative distance constraints, we suggest a Relative Distance Constrained Metric Learning (RDCML) model which can be easily implemented and effectively solved by a modified support vector machine (SVM) approach. Experimental results on UCI datasets and handwritten digits datasets show that RDCML achieves better or comparable classification accuracy when compared with the state-of-the-art metric learning methods.