Alternative Multiview Maximum Entropy Discrimination

Maximum entropy discrimination (MED) is a general framework for discriminative estimation based on maximum entropy and maximum margin principles, and can produce hard-margin support vector machines under some assumptions. Recently, the multiview version of MED multiview MED (MVMED) was proposed. In this paper, we try to explore a more natural MVMED framework by assuming two separate distributions p(1)(Theta(1)) over the first-view classifier parameter Theta(1) and p(2)(Theta(2)) over the second-view classifier parameter Theta(2). We name the new MVMED framework as alternative MVMED (AMVMED), which enforces the posteriors of two view margins to be equal. The proposed AMVMED is more flexible than the existing MVMED, because compared with MVMED, which optimizes one relative entropy, AMVMED assigns one relative entropy term to each of the two views, thus incorporating a tradeoff between the two views. We give the detailed solving procedure, which can be divided into two steps. The first step is solving our optimization problem without considering the equal margin posteriors from two views, and then, in the second step, we consider the equal posteriors. Experimental results on multiple real-world data sets verify the effectiveness of the AMVMED, and comparisons with MVMED are also reported.