Journal of Machine Learning Research 10 (2009) 207-244

Submitted 12/07; Revised 9/08; Published 2/09

Distance Metric Learning for Large Margin
Nearest Neighbor Classification
Kilian Q. Weinberger

KILIAN @ YAHOO - INC . COM

Yahoo! Research
2821 Mission College Blvd
Santa Clara, CA 9505

Lawrence K. Saul

SAUL @ CS . UCSD . EDU

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0404
La Jolla, CA 92093-0404

Editor: Sam Roweis

Abstract
The accuracy of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification depends significantly on the metric used
to compute distances between different examples. In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification from labeled examples. The Mahalanobis metriccan equivalently be viewed as a global linear transformation of the input space that precedes kNNclassification using Euclidean distances. In our approach, the metric is trained with the goal thatthe k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are
separated by a large margin. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the margin criterion leads to aconvex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our approach requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification.
In our framework, the Mahalanobis distance metric is obtained as the solution to a semidefinite
program. On several data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in thisway lead to significant improvements in kNN classification. Sometimes these results can be further
improved by clustering the training examples and learning an individual metric within each cluster.
We show how to learn and combine these local metrics in a globally integrated manner.
Keywords: convex optimization, semi-definite programming, Mahalanobis distance, metric learning, multi-class classification, support vector machines

1. Introduction
One of the oldest and simplest methods for pattern classification is the k-nearest neighbors (kNN)
rule (Cover and Hart, 1967). The kNN rule classifies each unlabeled example by the majority
label of its k-nearest neighbors in the training set. Despite its simplicity, the kNN rule often yields
competitive results and in certain domains, when cleverly combined with prior knowledge, it has
significantly advanced the state-of-the-art (Belongie et al., 2002; Simard et al., 1993).
By the very nature of its decision rule, the performance of kNN classification depends cruciallyon the way that distances are computed between different examples. When no prior knowledge
is available, most implementations of kNN compute simple Euclidean distances (assuming the examples are represented as vector inputs). Unfortunately, Euclidean distances ignore any statisticalc 2009 Kilian Q. Weinberger and Lawrence Saul.

W EINBERGER AND S AUL

regularities that might be estimated from a large training set of labeled examples. Ideally, one would
like to adapt the distance metric to the application at hand. Suppose, for example, that we are using
kNN to classify images of faces by age and gender. It can hardly be optimal to use the same distancemetric for age and gender classification, even if in both tasks, distances are computed between thesame sets of extracted features (e.g., pixels, color histograms).
Motivated by these issues, a number of researchers have demonstrated that kNN classification
can be greatly improved by learning an appropriate distance metric from labeled examples (Chopra
et al., 2005; Goldberger et al., 2005; Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2004; Shental et al., 2002). This is
the so-called problem of distance metric learning. Recently, it has been shown that even a simple
linear transformation of the input features can lead to significant improvements in kNN classification(Goldberger et al., 2005; Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2004). Our work builds in a novel direction on the
success of these previous approaches.
In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification. The
algorithm that we propose was described at a high level in earlier work (Weinberger et al., 2006)
and later extended in terms of scalability and accuracy (Weinberger and Saul, 2008). Intuitively, thealgorithm is based on the simple observation that the kNN decision rule will correctly classify an example if its k-nearest neighbors share the same label. The algorithm attempts to increase the numberof training examples with this property by learning a linear transformation of the input space thatprecedes kNN classification using Euclidean distances. The linear transformation is derived by minimizing a loss function that consists of two terms. The first term penalizes large distances between
examples in the same class that are desired as k-nearest neighbors, while the second term penalizes
small distances between examples with non-matching labels. Minimizing these terms yields a linear
transformation of the input space that increases the number of training examples whose k-nearest
neighbors have matching labels. The Euclidean distances in the transformed space can equivalently
be viewed as Mahalanobis distances in the original space. We exploit this equivalence to cast the
problem of distance metric learning as a problem in convex optimization.
Our approach is largely inspired by recent work on neighborhood component analysis (Goldberger et al., 2005) and metric learning in energy-based models (Chopra et al., 2005). Despite
similar goals, however, our method differs significantly in the proposed optimization. We formulate
the problem of distance metric learning as an instance of semidefinite programming. Thus, the optimization is convex, and its global minimum can be efficiently computed. There have been otherstudies in distance metric learning based on eigenvalue problems (Shental et al., 2002; De Bie et al.,2003) and semidefinite programming (Globerson and Roweis, 2006; Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2004;
Xing et al., 2002). These previous approaches, however, essentially attempt to learn distance metrics
that cluster together all similarly labeled inputs, even those that are not k-nearest neighbors. Thisobjective is far more difficult to achieve than what we propose. Moreover, it does not leverage thefull power of kNN classification, whose accuracy does not require that all similarly labeled inputs
be tightly clustered.
There are many parallels between our method and classification by support vector machines(SVMs)—most notably, a convex objective function based on the hinge loss, and the potential towork in nonlinear feature spaces by using the “kernel trick”. In light of these parallels, we describe
our approach as large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN) classification. Our framework can beviewed as the logical counterpart to SVMs in which kNN classification replaces linear classification.
Our framework contrasts with classification by SVMs, however, in one intriguing respect: it
requires no modification for multiclass problems. Extensions of SVMs to multiclass problems typi208

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cally involve combining the results of many binary classifiers, or they require additional machinerythat is elegant but non-trivial (Crammer and Singer, 2001). In both cases the training time scales atleast linearly in the number of classes. By contrast, our framework has no explicit dependence on
the number of classes.
We also show how to extend our framework to learn multiple Mahalanobis metrics, each ofthem associated with a different class label and/or region of the input space. The multiple metrics
are trained simultaneously by minimizing a single loss function. While the loss function couples
metrics in different parts of the input space, the optimization remains an instance of semidefinite
programming. The globally integrated training of local distance metrics distinguishes our approachfrom earlier work on discriminant adaptive kNN classification (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1996)
Our paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the general problem of distance metriclearning for kNN classification and reviews previous approaches that motivated our work. Section 3
describes our model for LMNN classification and formulates the required optimization as an instance of semidefinite programming. Section 4 presents experimental results on several data sets.
Section 5 discusses several extensions to LMNN classification, including iterative re-estimation oftarget neighbors, locally adaptive Mahalanobis metrics in different parts of the input space, and“kernelization” of the basic algorithm. Section 6 describes faster implementations for training andtesting in LMNN classification using ball trees. Section 7 concludes by summarizing our main contributions and sketching several directions of ongoing research. Finally, appendix A describes the
special-purpose solver that we implemented for large scale problems in LMNN classification.

2. BackgroundIn this section, we introduce the general problem of distance metric learning (section 2.1) and review
a number of previously studied approaches. Broadly speaking, these approaches fall into three
categories: eigenvector methods based on second-order statistics (section 2.2), convex optimizations
over the space of positive semidefinite matrices (section 2.3), and fully supervised algorithms that
directly attempt to optimize kNN classification error (section 2.4) .
2.1 Distance Metric Learning
We begin by reviewing some basic terminology. A mapping D : X × X → ℜ+
0 over a vector space X
is called a metric if for all vectors ∀~xi ,~x j ,~xk ∈ X , it satisfies the properties:
1. D(~xi ,~x j ) + D(~x j ,~xk ) ≥ D(~xi ,~xk ) (triangular inequality).
2. D(~xi ,~x j ) ≥ 0 (non-negativity).
3. D(~xi ,~x j ) = D(~x j ,~xi ) (symmetry).
4. D(~xi ,~x j ) = 0 ⇐⇒ ~xi =~x j (distinguishability).
Strictly speaking, if a mapping satisfies the first three properties but not the fourth, it is called apseudometric. However, to simplify the discussion in what follows, we will often refer to pseudometrics as metrics, pointing out the distinction only when necessary.
We obtain a family of metrics over X by computing Euclidean distances after performing alinear transformation ~x′ = L~x. These metrics compute squared distances as:
DL (~xi ,~x j ) = kL(~xi −~x j )k22 ,
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(1)

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where the linear transformation in Eq. (1) is parameterized by the matrix L. It is simple to showthat Eq. (1) defines a valid metric if L is full rank and a valid pseudometric otherwise.
It is common to express squared distances under the metric in Eq. (1) in terms of the squarematrix:
M = L⊤ L.

(2)

Any matrix M formed in this way from a real-valued matrix L is guaranteed to be positive semidefinite (i.e., to have no negative eigenvalues). In terms of the matrix M, we denote squared distances byDM (~xi ,~x j ) = (~xi −~x j )⊤ M(~xi −~x j ),(3)

and we refer to pseudometrics of this form as Mahalanobis metrics. Originally, this term wasused to describe the quadratic forms in Gaussian distributions, where the matrix M played the roleof the inverse covariance matrix. Here we allow M to denote any positive semidefinite matrix.
The distances in Eq. (1) and Eq. (3) can be viewed as generalizations of Euclidean distances. In
particular, Euclidean distances are recovered by setting M to be equal to the identity matrix.
A Mahalanobis distance metric can be parameterized in terms of the matrix L or the matrix M.
Note that the matrix L uniquely defines the matrix M, while the matrix M defines L up to rotation(which does not affect the computation of distances). This equivalence suggests two different approaches to distance metric learning. In particular, we can either estimate a linear transformation L,
or we can estimate a positive semidefinite matrix M. Note that in the first approach, the optimization is unconstrained, while in the second approach, it is important to enforce the constraint thatthe matrix M is positive semidefinite. Though generally more complicated to solve a constrained
optimization, this second approach has certain advantages that we explore in later sections.
Many researchers have proposed ways to estimate Mahalanobis distance metrics for the purposeof computing distances in kNN classification. In particular, let {(~xi , yi )}ni=1 denote a training set ofn labeled examples with inputs ~xi ∈ ℜd and discrete (but not necessarily binary) class labels yi ∈{1, 2, . . . , C }. For kNN classification, one seeks a linear transformation such that nearest neighbors
computed from the distances in Eq. (1) share the same class labels. We review several previous
approaches to this problem in the following section.
2.2 Eigenvector Methods
Eigenvector methods have been widely used to discover informative linear transformations of the
input space. As discussed in section 2.1, these linear transformations can be viewed as inducing a
Mahalanobis distance metric. Popular eigenvector methods for linear preprocessing are principal
component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and relevant component analysis. These methods
differ in the way that they use labeled or unlabeled data to derive linear transformations of the input
space. These methods can also be “kernelized” to work in a nonlinear feature space (Müller et al.,
2001; Schölkopf et al., 1998; Tsang et al., 2005), though we do not discuss such formulations here.
2.2.1 P RINCIPAL C OMPONENT A NALYSISWe briefly review principal component analysis (PCA) (Jolliffe, 1986) in the context of distancemetric learning. Essentially, PCA computes the linear transformation ~xi → L~xi that projects thetraining inputs {~xi }ni=1 into a variance-maximizing subspace. The variance of the projected inputs
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can be written in terms of the covariance matrix:C=

1 n∑ (~xi −~µ)⊤ (~xi −~µ),n i=1where~µ = n1 ∑i~xi denotes the sample mean. The linear transformation L is chosen to maximize thevariance of the projected inputs, subject to the constraint that L defines a projection matrix. In termsof the input covariance matrix, the required optimization is given by:
max Tr(L⊤ CL) subject to: LL⊤ = I.
L

(4)

The optimization in Eq. (4) has a closed-form solution; the standard convention equates the rowsof L with the leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix. If L is a rectangular matrix, the linear
transformation projects the inputs into a lower dimensional subspace. If L is a square matrix, then
the transformation does not reduce the dimensionality, but this solution still serves to rotate andre-order the input coordinates by their respective variances.
Note that PCA operates in an unsupervised setting without using the class labels of training
inputs to derive informative linear projections. Nevertheless, PCA still has certain useful properties
as a form of linear preprocessing for kNN classification. For example, PCA can be used for “denoising”: projecting out the components of the bottom eigenvectors often reduces kNN error rate.
PCA can also be used to accelerate neighbor nearest computations in large data sets. The linear
preprocessing from PCA can significantly reduce the amount of computation either by explicitly
reducing the dimensionality of the inputs, or simply by re-ordering the input coordinates in termsof their variance (as discussed further in section 6).
2.2.2 L INEAR D ISCRIMINANT A NALYSISWe briefly review linear discriminant analysis (LDA) (Fisher, 1936) in the context of distance metriclearning. Let Ωc denote the set of indices of examples in the cth class (with yi = c). Essentially,
LDA computes the linear projection ~xi → L~xi that maximizes the amount of between-class variancerelative to the amount of within-class variance. These variances are computed from the betweenclass and within-class covariance matrices, defined by:
1 C

Cb =

∑ c c
C c=1

Cw =

1 C
∑ ∑ (~xi −~µc )(~xi −~µc )⊤ ,
n c=1
i∈Ωc

~µ ~µ⊤ ,(5)

where~µc denotes the sample mean of the cth class; we also assume that the data is globally centered.
The linear transformation L is chosen to maximize the ratio of between-class to within-class variance, subject to the constraint that L defines a projection matrix. In terms of the above covariancematrices, the required optimization is given by: ⊤L Cb Lsubject to: LL⊤ = I.
(6)max TrL
L⊤ Cw LThe optimization in Eq. (6) has a closed-form solution; the standard convention equates the rowsof L with the leading eigenvectors of C−1
w Cb .
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LDA is widely used as a form of linear preprocessing for pattern classification. Unlike PCA,LDA operates in a supervised setting and uses the class labels of the inputs to derive informative
linear projections. Note that the between-class covariance matrix Cb in Eq. (5) has at most rank C ,where C is the number of classes. Thus, up to C linear projections can be extracted from theeigenvalue problem in LDA. Because these projections are based on second-order statistics, theywork well to separate classes whose conditional densities are multivariate Gaussian. When thisassumption does not hold, however, LDA may extract spurious features that are not well suited tokNN classification.
2.2.3 R ELEVANT C OMPONENT A NALYSIS
Finally, we briefly review relevant component analysis (RCA) (Shental et al., 2002; Bar-Hillel et al.,2006) in the context of distance metric learning. RCA is intermediate between PCA and LDA
in its use of labeled data. Specifically, RCA makes use of so-called “chunklet” information, or
subclass membership assignments. A chunklet is essentially a subset of a class. Inputs in the same
chunklet belong to the same class, but inputs in different chunklets do not necessarily belong todifferent classes. Essentially, RCA computes the linear projection ~xi → L~xi that “whitens” the datawith respect to the averaged within-chunklet covariance matrix. In particular, let Ωℓ denote theset of indices of examples in the ℓth chunklet, and let ~µℓ denote the mean of these examples. The
averaged within-chunklet covariance matrix is given by:
Cw =

1 L
∑ ∑ (~xi −~µl )(~xi −~µl )⊤ .
n l=1
i∈Ωl
−1/2

RCA uses the linear transformation~xi → L~xi with L = Cw . This transformation acts to normalize
the within-chunklet variance. An unintended side effect of this transformation may be to amplify
noisy directions in the data. Thus, it is recommended to de-noise the data by PCA before computing
the within-chunklet covariance matrix.
2.3 Convex Optimization
Recall that the goal of distance metric learning can be stated in two ways: to learn a linear transformation ~xi → L~xi or, equivalently, to learn a Mahalanobis metric M = LL⊤ . It is possible toformulate certain types of distance metric learning as convex optimizations over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices M. In this section, we review two previous approaches based on thisidea.
2.3.1 M AHALANOBIS M ETRIC FOR C LUSTERING
A convex objective function for distance metric learning was first proposed by Xing et al. (2002).
The goal of this work was to learn a Mahalanobis metric for clustering (MMC) with side-information.
MMC shares a similar goal as LDA: namely, to minimize the distances between similarly labeled inputs while maximizing the distances between differently labeled inputs. MMC differs from LDA in
its formulation of distance metric learning as an convex optimization problem. In particular, whereas
LDA solves the eigenvalue problem in Eq. (6) to compute the linear transformation L, MMC solves
a convex optimization over the matrix M = L⊤ L that directly represents the Mahalanobix metricitself.
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To state the optimization for MMC, it is helpful to introduce further notation. From the classlabels yi , we define the n × n binary association matrix with elements yi j = 1 if yi = y j and yi j = 0
otherwise. In terms of this notation, MMC attempts to maximize the distances between pairs of
inputs with different labels (yi j = 0), while constraining the sum over squared distances of pairs ofsimilarly labeled inputs (yi j = 1). In particular, MMC solves the following optimization:p
Maximize ∑i j (1 − yi j ) DM (~xi ,~x j ) subject to:(1) ∑i j yi j DM (~xi ,~x j ) ≤ 1(2) M  0.

The first constraint is required to make the problem feasible and bounded; the second constraint
enforces that M is a positive semidefinite matrix. The overall optimization is convex. The squareroot in the objective function ensures that MMC leads to generally different results than LDA.
MMC was designed to improve the performance of iterative clustering algorithms such as kmeans. In these algorithms, clusters are generally modeled as normal or unimodal distributions.
MMC builds on this assumption by attempting to minimize distances between all pairs of similarly
labeled inputs; this objective is only sensible for unimodal clusters. For this reason, however, MMC
is not especially appropriate as a form of distance metric learning for kNN classification. One of the
major strengths of kNN classification is its non-parametric framework. Thus a different objective
for distance metric learning is needed to preserve this strength of kNN classification—namely, thatit does not implicitly make parametric (or other limiting) assumptions about the input distributions.
2.3.2 O NLINE L EARNING OF M AHALANOBIS D ISTANCES
Convex optimizations over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices have also been proposed forperceptron-like approaches to distance metric learning. The Pseudometric Online Learning Algorithm (POLA) (Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2004) combines ideas from convex optimization and large
margin classification. Like LDA and MMC, POLA attempts to learn a metric that shrinks distances
between similarly labeled inputs and expands distances between differently labeled inputs. POLA
differs from LDA and MMC, however, in explicitly encouraging a finite margin that separates differently labeled inputs. POLA was also conceived in an online setting.
The online version of POLA works as follows. At time t, the learning environment presents atuple (~xt ,~xt′ , yt ), where the binary label yt indicates whether the two inputs ~xt and ~xt′ belong to thesame (yt = 1) or different (yt = −1) classes. From streaming tuples of this form, POLA attempts tolearn a Mahalanobis metric M and a scalar threshold b such that similarly labeled inputs are at mosta distance of b − 1 apart, while differently labeled inputs are at least a distance of b + 1 apart. These
constraints can be expressed by the single inequality:
h
i

(7)
yt b − ~xt −~xt′ ⊤M ~xt −~xt′ ≥ 1.

The distance metric M and threshold b are updated after each tuple (~ut ,~vt , yt ) to correct any violationof this inequality. In particular, the update computes a positive semidefinite matrix M that satisfies(7). The required optimization can be performed by an alternating projection algorithm, similar tothe one described in appendix A. The algorithm extends naturally to problems with more than twoclasses.
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W EINBERGER AND S AULPOLA can also be implemented on a data set of fixed size. In this setting, pairs of inputs arerepeatedly processed until no pair violates its margin constraints by more than some constant β > 0.
Moreover, as in perceptron learning, the number of iterations over the data set can be bounded above(Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2004).
In many ways, POLA exhibits the same strengths and weaknesses as MMC. Both algorithms
are based on convex optimizations that do not have spurious local minima. On the other hand,both algorithms make implicit assumptions about the distributions of inputs and class labels. The
margin constraints enforced by POLA are designed to learn a distance metric under which all pairsof similarly labeled inputs are closer than all pairs of differently labeled inputs. This type of learning
may often be unrealizable, however, even in situations where kNN classification is able to succeed.
For this reason, a different framework is required to learn distance metrics for kNN classification.
2.4 Neighborhood Component Analysis
Recently, Goldberger et al. (2005) considered how to learn a Mahalnobis distance metric especiallyfor kNN classification. They proposed a novel supervised learning algorithm known as Neighborhood Component Analysis (NCA). The algorithm computes the expected leave-one-out classification error from a stochastic variant of kNN classification. The stochastic classifier uses a
Mahalanobis distance metric parameterized by the linear transformation ~x → L~x in Eqs. (1–3). The
algorithm attempts to estimate the linear transformation L that minimizes the expected classification
error when distances are computed in this way.
The stochastic classifier in NCA is used to label queries by the majority vote of nearby training
examples, but not necessarily the k nearest neighbors. In particular, for each query, the reference
examples in the training set are drawn from a softmax probability distribution that favors nearby
examples over faraway ones. The probability of drawing ~x j as a reference example for ~xi is givenby:(exp (−kLxi −Lx j k2 )if i 6= j∑k6=i exp (−kLxi −Lxk k2 )pi j =(8)0
if i = j.
Note that there is no free parameter k for the number of nearest neighbors in this stochastic classifier.
Instead, the scale of L determines the size of neighborhoods from which nearby training examples
are sampled. On average, though, this sampling procedure yields similar results as a deterministic
kNN classifier (for some value of k) with the same Mahalanobis distance metric.
Under the softmax sampling scheme in Eq. (8), it is simple to compute the expected leave-oneout classification error on the training examples. As in section 2.3.1, we define the n×n binary
matrix with elements yi j = 1 if yi = y j and yi j = 0 otherwise. The expected error computes thefraction of training examples that are (on average) misclassified:εNCA = 1 −1
pi j yi j .
n∑
ij

(9)

The error in Eq. (9) is a continuous, differentiable function of the linear transformation L used tocompute Mahalanobis distances in Eq. (8).
Note that the differentiability of Eq. (9) depends on the stochastic neighborhood assignmentof the NCA decision rule. By contrast, the leave-one-out error of a deterministic kNN classifier isneither continuous nor differentiable in the parameters of the distance metric. For distance metric214

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learning, the differentiability of Eq. (9) is a key advantage of stochastic neighborhood assignment,
making it possible to minimize this error measure by gradient descent. It would be much moredifficult to minimize the leave-one-out error of its deterministic counterpart.
The objective function for NCA differs in one important respect from other algorithms reviewed
in this section. Though continuous and differentiable with respect to the parameters of the distancemetric, Eq. (9) is not convex, nor can it be minimized using eigenvector methods. Thus, the optimization in NCA can suffer from spurious local minima. In practice, the results of the learningalgorithm depend on the initialization of the distance metric.
The linear transformation in NCA can also be used to project the inputs into a lower dimensional
Euclidean space. Eqs. (8–9) remain valid when L is a rectangular as opposed to square matrix.
Lower dimensional projections learned by NCA can be used to visualize class structure and/or toaccelerate kNN search.
Recently, Globerson and Roweis (2006) proposed a related model known as Metric Learning
by Collapsing Classes (MLCC). The goal of MLCC is to find a distance metric that (like LDA)
shrinks the within-class variance while maintaining the separation between different classes. MLCC
uses a similar rule as NCA for stochastic classification, so as to yield a differentiable objectivefunction. Compared to NCA, MLCC has both advantages and disadvantages for distance metriclearning. The main advantage is that distance metric learning in MLCC can be formulated as aconvex optimization over the space of positive semidefinite matrices. The main disadvantage isthat MLCC implicitly assumes that the examples in each class have a unimodal distribution. In
this sense, MLCC shares the same basic strengths and weaknesses of the methods described in
section 2.3.

3. ModelThe model we propose for distance metric learning builds on the algorithms reviewed in section 2.
In common with all of them, we attempt to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric of the form in
Eqs. (1–3). Other key aspects of our model build on the particular strengths of individual approaches. As in MMC (see section 2.3.1), we formulate the parameter estimation in our model
as a convex optimization over the space of positive semidefinite matrices. As in POLA (see section 2.3.2), we attempt to maximize the margin by which the model correctly classifies labeled
examples in the training set. Finally, as in NCA (see section 2.4), our model was conceived specifically to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric that improves the accuracy of kNN classification.
Indeed, the three essential ingredients of our model are (i) its convex loss function, (ii) its goalof margin maximization, and (iii) the constraints on the distance metric imposed by accurate kNNclassification.
3.1 Intuition and Terminology
Our model is based on two simple intuitions (and idealizations) for robust kNN classification: first,
that each training input ~xi should share the same label yi as its k nearest neighbors; second, thattraining inputs with different labels should be widely separated. We attempt to learn a linear transformation of the input space such that the training inputs satisfy these properties. In fact, theseobjectives are neatly balanced by two competing terms in our model’s loss function. Specifically,
one term penalizes large distances between nearby inputs with the same label, while the other term
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penalizes small distances between inputs with different labels. To make precise these relative notions of “large” and “small”, however, we first need to introduce some new terminology.
Learning in our framework requires auxiliary information beyond the label yi of each input ~xi inthe training set. Recall that the goal of learning is to estimate a distance metric under which each
input ~xi has k nearest neighbors that share its same label yi . We facilitate this goal by identifying
target neighbors for each input ~xi at the outset of learning. The target neighbors of ~xi are those that
we desire to be closest to ~xi ; in particular, we attempt to learn a linear transformation of the input
space such that the resulting nearest neighbors of ~xi are indeed its target neighbors. We emphasizethat target neighbors are fixed a priori and do not change during the learning process. This step
significantly simplifies the learning process by specifying a priori which similarly labeled inputs tocluster together. In many applications, there may be prior knowledge or auxiliary information (e.g.,a similarity graph) that naturally identifies target neighbors. In the absence of prior knowledge, thesimplest prescription is to compute the k nearest neighbors with the same class label, as determinedby Euclidean distance. This was done for all the experiments in this paper. We use the notation j i
to indicate that input~x j is a target neighbor of input~xi . Note that this relation is not symmetric: j idoes not imply i j.
For kNN classification to succeed, the target neighbors of each input ~xi should be closer than all
differently labeled inputs. In particular, for each input ~xi , we can imagine the target neighbors asestablishing a perimeter that differently labeled inputs should not invade. We refer to the differently
labeled inputs in the training set that invade this perimeter as impostors; the goal of learning (roughly
speaking) is to minimize the number of impostors.
In fact, to increase the robustness of kNN classification, we adopt an even more stringent goal
for learning—namely to maintain a large (finite) distance between impostors and the perimeters
established by target neighbors. By maintaining a margin of safety around the kNN decision boundaries, we ensure that the model is robust to small amounts of noise in the training inputs. Thisrobustness criterion also gives rise to the name of our approach: large margin nearest neighbor(LMNN) classification.
In mathematical terms, impostors are defined by a simple inequality. For an input~xi with label yi
and target neighbor ~x j , an impostor is any input ~xl with label ~yl 6=~yi such thatkL(~xi −~xl )k2 ≤ kL(~xi −~x j )k2 + 1.

(10)

In other words, an impostor ~xl is any differently labeled input that invades the perimeter plus unit
margin defined by any target neighbor ~x j of the input ~xi .
Figure 1 illustrates the main idea behind LMNN classification. Before learning, a training input
has both target neighbors and impostors in its local neighborhood. During learning, the impostors
are pushed outside the perimeter established by the target neighbors. After learning, there exists
a finite margin between the perimeter and the impostors. The figure shows the idealized scenario
where kNN classification errors in the original input space are corrected by learning an appropriate
linear transformation.
3.2 Loss Function
With the intuition and terminology from the previous section, we can now construct a loss function
for LMNN classification. The loss function consists of two terms, one which acts to pull target
neighbors closer together, and another which acts to push differently labeled examples further apart.
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D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNINGBEFORE

AFTER

local neighborhood

marginmarginClass 1
xj

Class 2

xi

impostors

xiClass 3

εpull
εpush


xl


xj


xl
impostors

target neighbors

target neighbors

Figure 1: Schematic illustration of one input’s neighborhood before training (left) versus after training (right). The distance metric is optimized so that: (i) its k=3 target neighbors lie withina smaller radius after training; (ii) differently labeled inputs lie outside this smaller radius
by some finite margin. Arrows indicate the gradients on distances arising from different
terms in the cost function.

These two terms have competing effects, since the first is reduced by shrinking the distances between
examples while the second is generally reduced by magnifying them. We discuss each term in turn.
The first term in the loss function penalizes large distances between each input and its target
neighbors. In terms of the linear transformation L of the input space, the sum of these squared
distances is given by:
εpull (L) = ∑ kL(~xi −~x j )k2 .
j

(11)

i

The gradient of this term generates a pulling force that attracts target neighbors in the linearlytransformed input space. It is important that Eq. (11) only penalizes large distances between inputs
and their target neighbors; in particular, it does not penalize large distances between all similarly
labeled inputs. We purposefully do not penalize the latter because accurate kNN classification does
not require that all similarly labeled inputs be tightly clustered. Our approach is distinguishedin this way from many previous approaches to distance metric learning; see section 2. By only
penalizing large distances between neighbors, we build models that leverage the full power of kNNclassification.
The second term in the loss function penalizes small distances between differently labeled examples. In particular, the term penalizes violations of the inequality in Eq. (10). To simplify notation,
we introduce a new indicator variable yil = 1 if and only if yi = yl , and yil = 0 otherwise. In terms ofthis notation, the second term of the loss function ε push is given by:εpush (L) = ∑ ∑(1 − yil ) 1 + kL(~xi −~x j )k2 −kL(~xi −~xl )k2 +
i, j

(12)

i l

where the term [z]+ = max(z, 0) denotes the standard hinge loss. The hinge loss monitors the inequality in Eq. (10). If the inequality does not hold (i.e., the input ~xl lies a safe distance away from~xi ), then its hinge loss has a negative argument and makes no contribution to the overall loss func217

W EINBERGER AND S AUL

tion. The (sub-)gradient of Eq. (12) generates a pushing force that repels imposters away from theperimeter established by each example’s k nearest (similarly labeled) neighbors; see Fig. 1.
The choice of unit margin is an arbitrary convention that sets the scale for the linear transformation L (which enters every other term in the loss function). If a margin c > 0 was enforced insteadof the unit margin, the loss function would be minimized by the same linear transformation up to an√
overall scale factor c.
Finally, we combine the two terms εpull (L) and εpush (L) into a single loss function for distancemetric learning. The two terms can have competing effects—to attract target neighbors on one hand,to repel impostors on the other. A weighting parameter µ ∈ [0, 1] balances these goals:
ε(L) = (1−µ) ε pull (L) + µ ε push (L).

(13)

Generally, the parameter µ can be tuned via cross validation, though in our experience, the resultsfrom minimizing the loss function in Eq. (13) did not depend sensitively on the value of µ. In
practice, the value µ = 0.5 worked well.
The competing terms in Eq. (13) are analogous to those in the loss function for learning in SVMs
(Schölkopf and Smola, 2002). In both loss functions, one term penalizes the norm of the “parameter” vector (i.e., the weight vector of the maximum margin hyperplane, or the linear transformationin the distance metric), while the other incurs the hinge loss. Just as the hinge loss in SVMs is only
triggered by examples near the decision boundary, the hinge loss in Eq. (13) is only triggered bydifferently labeled examples that invade each other’s neighborhoods. Both loss functions in SVMs
and LMNN can be rewritten to depend on the input vectors only through their inner products. Working with the inner product matrix directly allows the application of the kernel trick; see section 5.3.
Finally, as in SVMs, we can formulate the minimization of the loss function in Eq. (13) as a convex
optimization. This last point will be developed further in section 3.4.
Our framework for distance metric learning provides an alternative to the earlier approach ofNCA (Goldberger et al., 2005) described in section 2.4. We briefly compare the two approaches at
a high level. Both LMNN and NCA are designed to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric over the
input space that improves kNN classification at test time. Though test examples are not available
during training, the learning algorithms for LMNN and NCA are based on training in “simulated”
test conditions. Neither approach directly minimizes the leave-one-out error1 for kNN classification
over the training set. The leave-one-out error is a piecewise constant but non-smooth function of thelinear transformation L, making it difficult to minimize directly. NCA uses stochastic neighborhood
assignment to construct a smooth loss function, thus circumventing this problem. LMNN uses thehinge loss to construct an upper bound on the leave-one-out error for kNN classification; this upper bound is continuous and similarly well behaved for standard gradient-based methods. In NCA,
it is not necessary to select a fixed number k of target neighbors in advance of the optimization.
Because the objective function for NCA is not convex, however, the initial conditions for the Mahalanobis metric implicitly favor the preservation of certain neighborhoods over others. By contrast,
in LMNN, the target neighborhoods must be explicitly specified. A potential advantage of LMNN
is that the required optimization can be formulated as an instance of semidefinite programming.
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D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

MCC

RCA

3-NN Test Error:
Input
LMNN
RCA
NCA
MCC
LDA

6.9%
3.7%
27.6%
3.3%
18.3%
49.0%

LDA
LMNN
NCA

Figure 2: A toy data set for distance metric learning, with n = 2000 data points sampled froma bi-modal distribution. Within each mode, examples from two classes are distributedin alternating vertical stripes. The figure shows the dominant axis extracted by several
different algorithms for distance metric learning. Only NCA and LMNN reduce the 1-NN
classification error on this data set; the other algorithms actually increase the error byfocusing on global versus local distances.

3.3 Local Versus Global Distances
We emphasize that the loss function for LMNN classification only penalizes large distances between
target neighbors as opposed to all examples in the same class. The toy data set in Fig. 2 illustrates
the potential advantages of this approach. The data was generated by sampling n=2000 data points
from two classes in a zebra striped pattern; additionally, the data for each class was generated in two
sets of stripes displaced by a large horizontal offset. As a result, this data set has the property thatwithin-class variance is much larger in the horizontal direction than the vertical direction; however,
local class membership is much more reliably predicted by examples that are nearby in the verticaldirection.
Algorithms such as LMNN and NCA perform very differently on this data set than algorithms
such as LDA, RCA, and MCC. In particular, LMNN and NCA adapt to the local striped structurein the data set and learn distance metrics that significantly reduce the kNN error rate. By contrast,
LDA, RCA, and MCC attempt to shrink distances between all examples in the same class andactually increase the kNN error rate as a result. Though this data set is especially contrived, it
illustrates in general the problems posed by classes with multimodal support. Such classes violate abasic assumption behind metric learning algorithms that attempt to shrink global distances between
all similarly labeled examples.
1. This is the number of training examples that would have been mislabeled by kNN classification if their label was infact unknown.

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W EINBERGER AND S AUL

3.4 Convex Optimization
The loss function in Eq. (13) is not convex in the matrix elements of the linear transformation L.
To minimize this loss function, one straightforward approach is gradient descent in the elementsof L. However, such an approach is prone to being trapped in local minima. The results of thisform of gradient descent will depend in general on the initial estimates for L. Thus they may not be
reproducible across different problems and applications.
We can overcome these difficulties by reformulating the optimization of Eq. (13) as an instanceof semidefinite programming (Boyd and Vandenberghe, 2004). A semidefinite program (SDP) isa linear program that incorporates an additional constraint on a symmetric matrix whose elements
are linear in the unknown variables. This additional constraint requires the matrix to be positive
semidefinite, or in other words, to only have nonnegative eigenvalues. This matrix constraint isnonlinear but convex, so that the overall optimization remains convex. There exist provably efficientalgorithms to solve SDPs (with polynomial time convergence guarantees).
We begin by reformulating Eq. (13) as an optimization over positive semidefinite matrices.
Specifically, as described in Eq. (2), we work in terms of the new variable M = L⊤ L. With thischange of variable, we can rewrite the squared distances that appear in the loss function using
Eq. (3). Recall that DM (~xi ,~x j ) denotes the squared distance with respect to the Mahalanobis metric M. As shown in section 2.1, this distance is equivalent to the Euclidean distance after the
mapping ~xi → L~xi . Substituting Eq. (3) into Eq. (13), we obtain the loss function:ε(M) = (1 − µ) ∑ DM (~xi ,~x j ) +µ ∑ ∑(1 − yil ) [1 + DM (~xi ,~x j )−DM (~xi ,~xl )]+ .
i, j

i

i, j

(14)

i l

With this substitution, the loss function is now expressed over positive semidefinite matrices M  0,
as opposed to real-valued matrices L. Note that the constraint M  0 must be added to the optimization to ensure that we learn a well-defined pseudometric.
The loss function in Eq. (14) is a piecewise linear, convex function of the elements in the matrix
M. In particular, the first term in the loss function (penalizing large distances between target neighbors) is linear in the elements of M, while the second term (penalizing impostors) is derived fromthe convex hinge loss. To formulate the optimization of Eq. (14) as an SDP, however, we need toconvert it into a more standard form.
An SDP is obtained by introducing slack variables which mimic the effect of the hinge loss. In
particular, we introduce nonnegative slack variables {ξi jl } for all triplets of target neighbors ( j i)
and impostors~xl . The slack variable ξi jl ≥0 is used to measure the amount by which the large margin
inequality in Eq. (10) is violated. Using the slack variables to monitor these margin violations, we
obtain the SDP:
Minimize (1 − µ) ∑i, j

xi −~x j )⊤ M(~xi −~x j ) + µ ∑i, j i,l (1 − yil )ξi jl subject to:i (~(1) (~xi −~xl )⊤ M(~xi −~xl ) − (~xi −~x j )⊤ M(~xi −~x j ) ≥ 1 − ξi jl(2) ξi jl ≥ 0(3) M  0.

While SDPs in this form can be solved by standard solver packages, general-purpose solvers
tend to scale poorly in the number of constraints. For this work, we implemented our own specialpurpose solver, exploiting the fact that most of the slack variables {ξi jl } never attain positive values.
The slack variables {ξi jl } are sparse because most inputs ~xi and ~xl are well separated relative to the220D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

distance between ~xi and any of its target neighbors ~x j . Such triplets do not incur a positive hinge
loss, resulting in very few active constraints in the SDP. Thus, a great speedup can be achievedby solving an SDP that only monitors a fraction of the margin constraints, then using the resulting
solution as a starting point for the actual SDP of interest.
Our solver was based on a combination of sub-gradient descent in both the matrices L and M,
the latter used mainly to verify that we had reached the global minimum. We projected updates in M
back onto the positive semidefinite cone after each step. Alternating projection algorithms provably
converge (Vandenberghe and Boyd, 1996), and in this case our implementation2 worked much fasterthan generic solvers. For a more detailed description of the solver please see appendix A.
3.5 Energy Based Classification
The matrix M that minimizes the loss function in Eq. (14) can be used as a Mahalanobis distancemetric for kNN classification. However, it is also possible to use the loss function directly as aso-called “energy-based” classifier. This use is inspired by previous work on energy-based models(Chopra et al., 2005).
Energy-based classification of a test example is done by considering it as an extra training example and computing the loss function in Eq. (14) for every possible label yt . In particular, for a test
example~xt with hypothetical label yt , we locate k (similarly labeled) target neighbors (as determinedby Euclidean distance to~xt or other a priori considerations) and then compute both terms in Eq. (14)given the already estimated Mahalanobis metric M. For the first term, we accumulate the squared
distances to the k target neighbors of ~xt . For the second term, we accumulate the hinge loss over
all impostors (i.e., differently labeled examples) that invade the perimeter around ~xt as determinedby its target neighbors; we also accumulate the hinge loss for differently labeled examples whose
perimeters are invaded by ~xt . Finally, the test example is classified by the hypothetical label thatminimizes the combination of these terms:(
yt= argminyt (1−µ) ∑ DM (~xt ,~x j ) + µ ∑ (1−ytl ) [1+DM (~xt ,~x j )−DM (~xt ,~xl )]+
j

t

j

t,l

)

+ µ ∑ (1−yit ) [1+DM (~xi ,~x j )−DM (~xi ,~xt )]+ .
i, j

i

(15)

Note that the relation j t in this criterion depends on the value of yt . As shown in Fig. 3, energybased classification with this assignment rule generally leads to further improvements in test error
rates. Often these improvements are significantly beyond those already achieved by adopting theMahalanobis distance metric M for kNN classification.

4. Results
We evaluated LMNN classification on nine data sets of varying size and difficulty. Some of thesedata sets were derived from collections of images, speech, and text, yielding very high dimensional
inputs. In these cases, we used PCA to reduce the dimensionality of the inputs before training
LMNN classifiers. Pre-processing the inputs with PCA helped to reduce computation time andavoid overfitting. Table 1 compares the different data sets in detail.
2. A matlab implementation is currently available at http://www.weinbergerweb.net/Downloads/LMNN.html.

221

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Figure 3: Training and test results on the five largest data sets, preprocessed in different ways, andusing different variants of kNN classification. We compared principal component analysis(pca), linear discriminant analysis (lda), relevant component analysis (rca), large margin
nearest neighbor classification (lmnn), lmnn with multiple passes (mp-lmnn), lmnn withmultiple metrics (mm-lmnn), multi-class support vector machines (svm), lmnn classification with the energy based decision rule (lmnn (energy)). All variations of lmnn, rca andlda were applied after pre-processing with pca for general noise reduction. See text andTable 1 for details. The lmnn results consistently outperform pca and lda. The multiple
metrics version of lmnn (mm-lmnn) is comparable with multiclass svm on most data sets(with 20news and yaleFaces as only exceptions).

Experimental results were obtained by averaging over multiple runs on randomly generated
70/30 splits of each data set. This procedure was followed with two exceptions: no averaging wasdone for the Isolet and MNIST data sets, which have pre-defined training/test splits. For all experiments reported in this paper, the number of target neighbors k was set to k = 3, and the weighting
parameter µ in Eqs. (14-15) was set to µ = 0.5. Though we experimented with different settings, theresults from LMNN classification appeared fairly insensitive to the values of these parameters.
The main results on the five largest data sets are shown in Fig. 3. (See Table 1 for a complete
listing of results, including those for various extensions of LMNN classification described in section 5.) All training error rates reported are leave-one-out estimates. To break ties among different
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D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

classes from the kNN decision rule, we repeatedly reduced the neighborhood size, ultimately classifying (if necessary) by just the k = 1 nearest neighbor. We begin by reporting overall trends, thendiscuss the results on individual data sets in more detail.
The first general trend is that LMNN classification using Mahalanobis distances consistently
improves on kNN classification using Euclidean distances. In general, the Mahalanobis metrics
learned by semidefinite programming led to significant improvements in kNN classification, both intraining and testing.
A second general trend is that the energy-based decision rule described in section 3.5 leads
to further improvements over the (already improved) results from kNN classification using Mahalanobis distances. In particular, better performance was observed on most of the large data sets. The
results are shown in Fig. 3.
A third general trend is that LMNN classification works better with PCA than LDA whensome form of dimensionality reduction is required for preprocessing. Table 1 shows the results of
LMNN classification on inputs whose dimensionality was reduced by LDA. While pre-processing
by LDA helps on some data sets (e.g., wine, yale faces), it generally leads to worse results than preprocessing by PCA. On some data sets, moreover, it leads to drastically worse results (e.g., olivetti
faces, MNIST). Consequently we used PCA as a pre-processing step for all subsequent experiments
throughout this paper.
A fourth general trend is that LMNN classification yields larger improvements on larger data
sets. Though we do not have a formal analysis that accounts for this observation, we can provide
the following intuitive explanation. One crucial aspect of the optimization in LMNN classificationis the choice of the target neighbors. In all of our experiments, we chose the target neighbors basedon Euclidean distance in the input space (after dimensionality reduction by PCA or LDA). This
choice was a simple heuristic used in the absence of prior knowledge. However, the quality of thischoice presumably depends on the sample density of the data set. In particular, as the sample density
increases, we suspect that more reliable discriminative signals can be learned from target neighbors
chosen in this way. The experimental results bear this out.
Finally, we compare our results to those of competing methods. We take multi-class SVMs
(Crammer and Singer, 2001) as providing a fair representation of the state-of-the-art. On each dataset (except MNIST), we trained multi-class SVMs using linear, polynomial and RBF kernels andchose the best kernel with cross validation. On MNIST, we used a non-homogeneous polynomial
kernel of degree four, which gave us our best results, as also reported in LeCun et al. (1995). The
results of the energy-based LMNN classifier are very close to those of state-of-the-art multi-class
SVMs: better on some data sets, worse on others. However, consistent improvement over multiclass SVMs was obtained by a multiple-metric variant of LMNN, discussed in section 5.2. This
multi-metric extension outperformed SVMs on three of the five large data sets; see Fig. 3. On the
only data set with a large performance difference, 20-newsgroups, the multi-class SVMs benefited
from training in the original d = 20000 dimensional input space, whereas the LMNN classifiers
were trained only on the input’s leading d = 200 principal components. Based on these results, insection 7, we suggest some applications that seem particularly well suited to LMNN classification,
though poorly suited to SVMs. These are applications with moderate input dimensionality, but large
numbers of classes.
To compare with previous work, we also evaluated RCA (Shental et al., 2002), LDA (Fisher,1936) and NCA (Goldberger et al., 2005) on the same data sets. For NCA and RCA, we used thecode provided by the authors; however, the NCA code ran out of memory on the larger data sets.
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Table 1 shows the results of all algorithms on small and larger data sets. LMNN outperforms theseother methods for distance metric learning on the four largest data sets. In terms of running times,
RCA is by far the fastest method (since its projections can be computed in closed form), while
NCA is the slowest, mainly due to the O(n2 ) normalization of its softmax probability distributions.
Although the optimization in LMNN naively scales as O(n2 ), in practice it can be accelerated byvarious efficiency measures: Appendix A discusses our semidefinite programming solver in detail.
We did also include the results of MCC (Xing et al., 2002); however, the code provided by theauthors could only handle a few of the small data sets. As shown in Table 1, on those data sets it
resulted in classification rates generally higher than NCA.
The results of experiments on particular data sets provide additional insight into the performanceof LMNN classification versus competing methods. We give a more detailed overview of theseexperiments in what follows.
4.1 Small Data Sets with Few Classes
The wine, iris, and bal data sets are small in size, with less than 500 training examples. Each of thesedata sets has three classes. The data sets are available from the UCI Machine Learning Repository.3
On data sets of this size, a distance metric can be learned in a matter of seconds. The results inTable 1 were averaged over 100 experiments with different random 70/30 splits of each data set.
On these data sets, LMNN classification improves on kNN classification with a Euclidean distance metric. These results could potentially be improved further with better measures against
overfitting (such as regularization). Table 1 also compares the results from LMNN classification toother competing methods. Here, the results are somewhat variable; compared to NCA, RCA, LDA,
and multiclass SVMs, LMNN fares better in some cases, worse in others. We mainly report theseresults to facilitate direct comparisons with previously published work. However, the small size ofthese data sets makes it difficult to assess the significance of these results. Moreover, these data sets
do not represent the regime in which we expect LMNN classification to be most useful.
4.2 Face Recognition
The Olivetti face recognition data set4 contains 400 grayscale images of 40 subjects in 10 different poses. We downsampled the images to 38 × 31 pixels and used PCA to further reduce thedimensionality, projecting the images into the subspace spanned by the first 200 eigenfaces (Turkand Pentland, 1991). Training and test sets were created by randomly sampling 7 images of eachsubject for training and 3 images for testing. The task involved 40-way classification—essentially,recognizing a face from an unseen pose. Table 1 shows the improvements due to LMNN classification. Fig. 4 illustrates the improvements more graphically by showing how the k = 3 nearest
neighbors change as a result of learning a Mahalanobis metric. (Although the algorithm operated
on downsampled, projected images, for clarity the figure shows the original images.)
The (extended) Yale face data set contains n = 2414 frontal images of 38 subjects. For eachsubject, there are 64 images taken under extreme illumination conditions. (A few subjects are
represented with fewer images.) As for the Olivetti data set, we preprocessed the images by downsampling and projecting them onto their leading 200 principal components. To reduce the impact ofthe very high variance in illumination, we followed the standard practice of discarding the leading 5
3. Available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/$\sim$mlearn/MLRepository.html.
4. Available at http://www.uk.research.att.com/facedatabase.html.

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D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

eigenvectors. Results from LMNN classification were averaged over 10 runs of 70/30 splits. Each
split was obtained by randomly selecting 45 images of each subject for training and 19 images fortesting. This protocol ensured that the training examples were evenly distributed across the relatively large number of classes. To guard against overfitting, we employed a validation set consistingof 30% of the training data and stopped the training early when the lowest classification error on thevalidation set was reached. On this data set, Fig. 3 shows that the LMNN metric outperforms the
Euclidean metric and even improves on multiclass SVMs. (Particularly effective on this data set,though, is the simple strategy of LDA.)

Test Image:Correct class member that
became one of the 3-NN
under the learned
Mahalanobis metric.
Impostor under Euclidean
3-NN, that was moved out of
the neighborhood under thelearned Mahalanobis metric.

Figure 4: Test images from the Olivetti face recognition data set (top row). The middle row shows
images from the same class that were among the 3-NN under the learned Mahalanobis
metric (after training) but not among the original 3-NN under the Euclidean metric (before
training). The bottom row shows impostors under the Euclidean metric that were nolonger inside the local neighborhoods under the Mahalanobis metric.

4.3 Spoken Letter Recognition
The Isolet data set from the UCI Machine Learning Repository contains 6238 examples and 26
classes corresponding to letters of the alphabet. We reduced the input dimensionality (originally at617) by projecting the data onto its leading 172 principal components—enough to account for 95%
of its total variance. On this data set, Dietterich and Bakiri report test error rates of 4.2% using
nonlinear backpropagation networks with 26 output units (one per class) and 3.3% using nonlinear
backpropagation networks with a 30-bit error correcting code (Dietterich and Bakiri, 1995). LMNN
with energy-based classification obtains a test error rate of 3.4%.
4.4 Letter Recognition
The letter recognition data set was also taken from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. It contains randomly distorted images of the 26 letters in the English alphabet in 20 different fonts. The
features consist of 16 attributes, such as height, width, correlations of axes and others.5 It is inter5. Full details on the data set can be found at http://www.ics.uci.edu/$\sim$mlearn/databases/
letter-recognition/letter-recognition.names.

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esting that LMNN with energy-based classification significantly outperforms other variants of kNNclassification on this data set.

Test
Test Image:
image:
NearestNearestneighborneighbor
after
training:
after training:
NearestNearestneighborneighbor
beforetraining:
before training:
Test
TestImage:
image:
NearestNearestneighborneighbor
after
aftertraining:training:
NearestNearestneighborneighbor
beforetraining:
before training:

Figure 5: Images from the MNIST data set, along with nearest neighbors before and after training.
4.5 Text Categorization
The 20-newsgroups data set consists of posted articles from 20 newsgroups, with roughly 1000
articles per newsgroup. We used the 18828-version of the data set6 in which cross-postings are
removed and some headers stripped out. The data set was tokenized using the rainbow package(McCallum, 1996). Each article was initially represented by a word-count vector for the 20,000 mostcommon words in the vocabulary. These word-count vectors were then reduced in dimensionality
by projecting them onto their leading 200 principal components. The results in Fig. 3 were obtainedby averaging over 10 runs with 70/30 splits for training and test data. The best result for LMMN
on this data set improved significantly over kNN classification using Euclidean distances and PCA(with 14.98% versus 48.57% and 18.22% test error rates). LMNN was outperformed by multiclassSVM (Crammer and Singer, 2001), which obtained a 8.0% test error rate using a linear kernel and20000 dimensional inputs.7
4.6 Handwritten Digit Recognition
The MNIST data set of handwritten digits8 has been extensively benchmarked (LeCun et al., 1995).
We deskewed the original 28×28 grayscale images, then reduced their dimensionality by projecting
them onto their leading 164 principal components (enough to capture 95% of the data’s overall
6. Available at http://people.csail.mit.edu/jrennie/20Newsgroups/.
7. Results vary from previous work (Weinberger et al., 2006) due to different pre-processing.
8. Available at http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/.

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Benchmark test error rates
statistics# inputs# features# reduced dimensions# training examples# testing examples# classes# of train/test splits% validation

mnist
70000
784
164
60000
10000
10
1
0

letters
20000
16
16
14000
6000
26
10
0

20news
18827
20000
200
13179
5648
20
10
0

isolet
7797
617
172
6238
1559
26
1
0

yFaces
2414
8064
300
1690
724
38
10
30

bal
535
4
4
375
161
3
100
0

oFaces
400
200
200
280
120
40
100
30

wine
152
13
13
106
46
3
100
0

iris
128
4
4
90
38
3
100
30

kNN
Euclidean
PCA
LDA
RCA
MCC
NCA

2.12
2.43
6.16
5.93
N/A
N/A

4.68
4.68
4.63
4.34
N/A
N/A

48.57
18.22
16.15
16.06
N/A
N/A

8.98
8.60
5.90
5.71
N/A
N/A

29.19
10.79
4.80
4.83
N/A
N/A

18.33
18.33
10.82
12.31
15.66
5.33

6.03
2.80
10.01
10.02
15.91
2.60

25.00
25.00
2.17
2.28
30.96
28.67

4.87
4.87
4.00
3.71
3.55
4.32

LMNN
PCA
LDA
LMNN (energy)
LMNN (multiple passes)
LMNN (multiple metrics)

1.72
6.16
1.37
1.69
1.18

3.60
3.61
2.67
2.80
3.06

14.98
16.98
22.09
13.83
12.82

4.36
5.84
3.40
4.30
4.04

5.90
5.08
10.11
5.52
4.05

11.16
10.84
9.14
5.86
10.72

3.28
40.72
3.16
4.83
3.11

8.72
2.11
7.67
7.59
8.72

4.37
3.79
3.68
4.26
4.66

solver statistics
CPU time (1M)
CPU time (MM)# active constraints (1M)
# active constraints (MM)3h 25m8h 43m
5400373051142m
14m
135715
18588

70m
74m
676482101803

20m
84m
64396
135832

8m
14m
86994
30135

6s
8s
41522
31717

66s
149s
3843
70

14s
16s
10194
748

2s
5s
574
1548

1.20

3.21

8.04

3.40

15.22

1.92

1.90

22.24

3.45

multiclass SVM

larger data sets

smaller data sets

Table 1: Results and statistics from all experiments. The data sets are sorted by largest to smallest from left to right. The table shows data statistics and error rates from different variants of LMNN training (single-pass, multi-pass, multi-metric), testing (kNN decision rule,energy-based classification), and preprocessing (PCA, LDA). Results from RCA, NCA
and multiclass support vector machines (SVMs) are also provided for comparison. See
section 5 for discussion of multi-pass and multi-metric LMNN training.

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relative classification error

relative classification error with multiple runs of LMNN
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Figure 6: The relative change of the 3-NN classification error after multiple runs of LMNN over a
single run of LMNN.

variance). Energy-based LMNN classification yielded a test error rate at 1.4%, cutting the baselinekNN error rate by over one-third. Other comparable benchmarks (LeCun et al., 1995) (not exploiting
additional prior knowledge) include multilayer neural nets at 1.6% and SVMs at 1.2%. Fig. 5
shows some digits whose nearest neighbor changed as a result of learning, from a mismatch using
Euclidean distances to a match using Mahalanobis distances. Table 1 reveals that the LMNN error
can be further reduced by learning a different distance metric for each digit class. This is discussed
further in section 5.2.

5. Extensions
In this section, we investigate four extensions designed to improve LMNN classification. Section 5.1
examines the impact of multiple consecutive applications of LMNN on one data set. Section 5.2
shows how to learn multiple (locally linear) metrics instead of a single global metric. Section 5.3
discusses how to “kernelize” the algorithm for LMNN classification and reviews complementary
work by Torresani and Lee (2007). Finally, section 5.4 investigates the use of LMNN as a method
for supervised dimensionality reduction.
5.1 Multi-pass LMNN
One potential weakness of LMNN is that target neighbors must be a priori specified. In the absence of prior knowledge, a default choice is to use Euclidean distances to determine target nearest
neighbors. While the target nearest neighbors are fixed during learning, however, the actual nearest
neighbors may change as a result of the linear transformation of the input space. These changes
suggest an iterative approach, in which the Mahalanobis distances learned in one application (or“pass”) of LMNN are used to determine the target nearest neighbors in a subsequent run of the algorithm. More formally, let L p be the transformation matrix obtained from the pth pass of LMNN.
For the (p+1)th pass, we can assign target neighbors using the Euclidean distance metric after the
linear transformation ~xi → L p L p−1 ...L1 L0~xi (with L0 = I).
To evaluate this approach, we performed multiple passes of LMNN on all the data sets from
Table 1. The parameter k was set to k = 3. Figure 6 shows the relative improvements in kNN classi228

D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

1 Metric:
1-nn error: 100%

2 Metrics:
1-nn error: 21%

3 Metrics:
1-nn error: 0%

Figure 7: A synthetic data set to illustrate the potential of multiple metrics. The data set consistsof inputs sampled from two concentric circles, each of which defines a different classmembership. LMNN training was used to estimate one global metric, as well as multiple
local metrics. Left: a single linear metric cannot model the non-linear decision boundary.
The leave-one-out (LOO) error is 100%. Middle: if the data set is divided into two
clusters (by k-means), and a local metric learned within each cluster, the error rate drops
drastically. Right: the use of three metrics reduces the LOO-error on the training set tozero. The principal directions of individual distance metrics are indicated by arrows.

fication error rates on the five largest data sets. (Here, a value of one indicates that multiple passesof LMNN did not change the error rate, while a value less than one indicates an improvement.)
On these data sets, multiple passes of LMMN were generally helpful, sometimes significantly improving the results. On smaller data sets, though, the multi-pass strategy seemed prone to overfit.
Table 1 shows the absolute results on all data sets from multiple passes of LMNN (indicated by
MP-LMNN).
A better strategy for choosing target neighbors remains an open question. This aspect of LMNN
classification differs significantly from NCA, which does not require the choice of target neighbors.
In fact, NCA also determines the effective neighborhood size as part of its optimization. On theother hand, the optimization in NCA is not convex; as such, the initial conditions implicitly specify
a basin of attraction that determines the final result. In LMNN classification, the target neighbors
are fixed in order to obtain a convex optimization. This trade-off is reminiscent of other convex
relaxations of computationally hard problems in machine learning.
5.2 Multi-metric LMNN
On some data sets, a global linear transformation of the input space may not be sufficiently powerful
to improve kNN classification. Figure 7 shows an example of a synthetic data set for which a single
metric is not sufficient. The data set consists of inputs sampled from two concentric circles, eachof which defines a different class membership. Global linear transformations cannot improve theaccuracy of kNN classification of this data set. In general, highly nonlinear multiclass decisionboundaries may not be well modeled by a single Mahalanobis distance metric.
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In these situations, one useful extension of LMNN is to learn multiple locally linear transformations instead of a single global linear transformation. In this section, we show how to learn different
Mahalanobis distance metrics for different examples in the input space. The idea of learning locallylinear distance metrics for kNN classification is at least a decade old (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1996).
It has also been explored more recently in the context of metric learning for semi-supervised clustering (Bilenko et al., 2004). The novelty of our approach lies in learning these metrics specificallyto maximize the margin of correct kNN classification. As a first step, we partition the training data
into disjoint clusters using k-means, spectral clustering (Shi and Malik, 2000), or label information.
(In our experience, the latter seems to work best.) We then learn a Mahalanobis distance metric foreach cluster. While the training procedure couples the distance metrics in different clusters, the optimization remains a convex problem in semidefinite programming. The globally integrated trainingof local distance metrics also distinguishes our approach from earlier work (Hastie and Tibshirani,1996).
Before developing this idea more formally, we first illustrate its potential in a toy setting—namely, on the data set in Fig. 7. For this data set, LMNN training was used to estimate one global
metric, as well as multiple local metrics (as described below). Cluster boundaries in the input space
were determined by the k-means algorithm. We measured the leave-one-out (LOO) training error(with k = 1 nearest neighbors) after learning one, two and three metrics. With one metric, the error
was 100%; with two metrics, it dropped to 21%; finally, with three metrics, it vanished altogether.
The figure illustrates how the multiple metrics adapt to the local structure of the class decisionboundaries.
In order to learn different Mahalanobis metrics in different parts of the input space, we minimize
a variation of the objective function in Eq. (14). We denote the different metrics by M1 , . . . , Mc ,where c is the number of clusters. If we partition the training examples by their class labels, thenc also coincides with the number of classes; this was done for the remaining experiments in thissection. In this case, as the cluster that contains ~xi is indexed by its label yi , we can refer to its
metric as Myi . We further define the cluster-dependent distance between two vectors ~xi and ~x j as:D̂ (~xi ,~x j ) = (~xi −~x j )⊤ My j (~xi −~x j ).

(16)

Note that this cluster-dependent measure of distance D̂ (~xi ,~x j ) is not symmetric with respect to its
input arguments. In a slight abuse of terminology, however, we will continue to refer to Eq. (16)as a distance metric; the symmetry is not required for its use in kNN classification. To learn these
metrics from data, we solve a modified version of the original SDP:
Minimize (1 − µ) ∑i, j i (~xi −~x j )⊤ My j (~xi −~x j ) + µ ∑ j i,l (1 − yil )ξi jl
subject to:(1) (~xi −~xl )⊤ Myl (~xi −~xl ) − (~xi −~x j )⊤ My j (~xi −~x j ) ≥ 1 − ξi jl(2) ξi jl ≥ 0(3) Mi  0 for i = 1, . . . , c.
Note that all the matrices Mi are learned simultaneously by solving a single SDP. This approach ensures the consistency of distance computations in different clusters: for example, thedistance from a test example to training examples with different labels. The integrated learningof different metrics is necessary to calibrate these distances on the same scale; if the metrics were230

D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

learned independently, then the distances computed by different metrics could not be meaningfullycompared—obviously, a crucial requirement for kNN classification.

zeros
ones
twos
fours

Figure 8: Multiple local distance metrics learned for a data set consisting of handwritten digits four,
two, one and zero.

Fig. 8 illustrates the multiple metrics learned from an image data set of four different handwritten digits: zero, one, four, and two. The plot shows the first two principal components of thedata. Only these principal components were used in training in order to yield an easily visualized
solution. The solution can be visualized by illustrating the metrics as ellipsoids centered at the classmeans. The ellipsoids show the effect on a unit circle of each local linear transformation learned by
LMNN. The line inside each ellipsoid indicates its principal axis.
We experimented with this multi-metric version of LMNN on all of the data sets from section 4.
To avoid overfitting, we held out 30% of each data set’s training examples and used them as avalidation set. We learned one metric per class. To speed up training, we initialized the multi-metric
optimization by setting each class-dependent metric to the solution from LMNN classification witha single global distance metric. Table 1 reports the error rates and other results from all theseexperiments (under “MM-LMNN”). The training times for MM-LMNN include the time required
to compute the initial metric settings from the optimization in Eq. (14).
Fig. 9 shows the relative improvement in 3-NN classification error rates from multi-metric
LMNN over standard LMNN on the five largest data sets. The multiple metrics variant improves
over standard LMNN on every data set. The best result occurs on the MNIST handwritten digits
data set, where MM-LMNN obtained a 1.18% kNN classification error rate, slightly outperforming multi-class SVMs. However, the improvement from multi-metric LMNN is not as consistently
observed when the energy-based decision rule is used for classification.
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W EINBERGER AND S AUL

relative classification error

relative classification error with multiple metrics

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5.3 Kernel Version
LMNN can also be extended by using kernel methods (Schölkopf and Smola, 2002) to work ina nonlinear feature space, as opposed to the original input space. The idea of learning a kernel
matrix has been explored in other contexts (Kwok and Tsang, 2003; Lanckriet et al., 2004; Varma
and Ray, 2007), particularly large margin classification by support vector machines. This idea for
LMNN has been investigated in detail by Torresani and Lee (2007). The “kernel trick” is used tomap the inputs ~xi into higher (possibly infinite) dimensional feature vectors Φ(~xi ). To avoid thecomputational cost of working directly with these feature vectors, they are only accessed throughtheir inner products, which are pre-computed and stored in the kernel matrix:
Ki j = Φ(~xi )⊤ Φ(~x j ).
Note how in Eq. (14), the inputs ~xi are only accessed in terms of the distances in Eq. (3). Torresaniand Lee (2007) considered Mahalanobis metrics of the form M = ∑lm Alm Φ(~xl )Φ(~xm )⊤ , where thematrix A is constrained to be positive semidefinite. They showed that the gradient of Eq. (14) withrespect to the matrix A can be written entirely in terms of the elements of the kernel matrix. Thus,a “kernelized” version of LMNN can be implemented efficiently in the same way as kernel PCA(Schölkopf et al., 1998), without ever working directly in the high dimensional feature space.
Torresani and Lee (2007) show that the kernelized version of LMNN can lead to significant
further improvements, but at the cost of increased computation. The increased computation is dueto the size of the matrix that must be learned in this setting: the matrix A has O(n2 ) elements insteadof O(d 2 ). (However, the kernel version could require less computation in applications where n < d.)More details on the kernelized version of LMNN can be found in their paper.
5.4 Dimensionality Reduction
Often it is useful to generate low dimensional representations of high dimensional data. These representations can be used to visualize the data and/or to accelerate algorithms whose time complexity
232

D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

scales with the input dimensionality. In section 6, for example, we will investigate how to accelerate the kNN search in LMNN classification by mapping the training data into a low dimensional
subspace.
Low dimensional representations of inputs can be derived from the linear transformation ~xi →L~xi in LMNN classification. This can be done in two ways. The first way is to project the transformed inputs onto their leading principal components. Note that if the inputs are whitened prior to
optimizing Eq. (13), then these principal components are given simply by the leading eigenvectorsof the square matrix L. Another way to derive low dimensional representations is to build this goal
explicitly into the optimization for LMNN classification. In particular, we can attempt to minimize
Eq. (13) with respect to L (rather than with respect to M = L⊤ L) and constrain L to be rectangularof size r × d, where r is the desired output dimensionality (presumed to be much smaller than the
input dimensionality, d). The optimization in terms of L is not convex, but in practice (Torresani and
Lee, 2007), it does not appear to suffer from very poor local minima. In the following section, we
use and compare both these methods to build efficient tree data structures for LMNN classification.

6. Metric Trees
One inherent disadvantage of kNN search is its relatively high computational complexity at test
time. The simplest brute-force way to locate a test example’s nearest neighbors is to compute its
distance to all the training examples. Such a naı̈ve implementation has a test time-complexity ofO(nd), where n is the number of training examples, and d is the input dimensionality.
One way to accelerate kNN search is to rotate the input space such that the coordinate axes arealigned with the data’s principal components. Such a rotation sorts the input coordinates by decreasing variance; see Section 2.2.1. This ordering can be used to prune unnecessary computations
in kNN search. In particular, for any test example, a nearest neighbor query consists of computing
the distance to each training example and comparing this distance to the k closest examples alreadylocated. The distance computation to a particular training example can be aborted upon determining that it lies further away than the k closest examples already located. When the coordinate axes
are aligned with the principal components, this determination can often be made after examining
just a few of the leading, load-bearing dimensions. We have used this optimization in our baseline
implementation of kNN search.
Generally there are two major approaches to gain additional speed-ups. The first approach isto reduce the input dimensionality d. The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma (Dasgupta and Gupta,
1999) states that n points can be mapped into a space of dimensionality O( log(n)) such that theε2distances between any two points changes only by a factor of (1 ± ε). Thus we can often reducethe dimensionality of the input data without distorting the nearest neighbor relations. (Note alsothat for kNN classification, we may tolerate inexact nearest neighbor computations if they do notlead to significant errors in classification.) The second approach to speed up kNN search is to build
a sophisticated tree-based data structure for storing training examples. Such a data structure canreduce the nearest neighbor test time complexity in practice to O(d log n) (Beygelzimer et al., 2006).
This latter method works best for low dimensional data. Fig. 10 compares a baseline implementationof kNN search versus one based on ball trees (Liu et al., 2005; Omohundro, 1987). Note how the
speed-up from the ball trees is magnified by dimensionality reduction of the inputs.
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W EINBERGER AND S AUL

3-NN Classification with Ball Tree Data Structure($#$%

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Figure 10: Relative speed-up for 3NN classification obtained from different orthogonal projectionsof MNIST handwritten digits onto their leading principal components. For these experiments, the d = 784 dimensional inputs from the raw images were projected onto thenumber of principal components shown on the x-axis. The figure compares the speedups when ball trees are used (blue) versus when ball trees are not used (red) in the lower
dimensional space. Note how the gains from ball trees diminish with increasing dimensionality. All the NN computations in these experiments were accelerated by aligning
the coordinate axes along principal components, as described in section 6.

In this section, we explore the use of ball trees for LMNN classification and dimensionality reduction. We find that ball trees can be used for both faster training and testing of LMNN classifiers.
6.1 Review of Ball Trees
Several authors have proposed tree-based data structures to speed up kNN search. Examples are
kd-trees (Friedman et al., 1977), ball trees (Liu et al., 2005; Omohundro, 1987) and cover-trees(Beygelzimer et al., 2006). All these data structures exploit the same idea: to partition the input
space data into hierarchically nested bounding regions. The bounding regions are set up to guaranteethat the distance from a test example to a training example inside the bounding region is at least as
large as the distance from the test example’s to the region’s boundary. Thus, for each test example,
the training examples inside the bounding region can be ruled out as k nearest neighbors if k training
examples have already been found that are closer than the region’s boundary. In this case, thekNN search can proceed without explicitly computing the distances to training examples in thebounding region. This “pruning” of distance computations often leads to a significant speedup in
kNN computation time.
We experimented with ball trees (Liu et al., 2005), in which the bounding regions are hyperspheres. Fig. 11 illustrates the basic idea behind ball trees. If a set S of training examples is
encapsulated inside a ball with center ~c and radius r, such that ∀~x ∈ S : k~x −~ck ≤ r, then for any
test example ~xt we can bound the distance to any training example inside the ball by the following
expression:∀~xi ∈ S k~xt −~xi k ≥ max(k~xt −~ck2 − r, 0).
(17)Ball trees exploit this inequality to build a hierarchical data structure. The data structure is based234

D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

xj
c
xi

r

xt − c − rxt − xj 

xt

xt − xi 

Figure 11: The basic idea behind ball trees: for any training example~xi inside the ball we can boundthe distance k~xt −~xi k2 from below using (17). If another training example ~x j outsider
the ball is already known to be closer than this bound to the test example ~xt , then the
training examples inside the ball can be ruled out as nearest neighbors.

on recursively splitting the training examples into two disjoint sets. The sets are encapsulated byhyperspheres (or “balls”) which may be partially overlapping. The training examples are recursively
divided into smaller and smaller sets until no leaf set contains more than some predefined numberof examples.
From this hierarchical data structure, the k-nearest neighbors of a test example can be found by
a standard depth-first tree-based search. Recall that each node in the tree has an associated hypersphere that encloses the training examples stored by its descendants. The kNN search proceeds bytraversing the tree and computing a test example’s distance to the center of each node’s hypersphere.
The tree is traversed by greedily descending sub-trees in order of this distance. Before descending
a subtree, however, Eq. (17) is checked to determine whether training examples in the subtree lie
further away than the currently estimated k-nearest neighbors. If this is true, the sub-tree is pruned
from the search without further computation. When a leaf node is reached, all the training examples
at the leaf node are compared to the currently estimated k-nearest neighbors, and the estimates are
updated as necessary. Note that ball trees support exact queries for kNN search.
As pointed out earlier, and as illustrated by Fig. 10, ball trees yield the largest gains in kNN
search time for low dimensional data. When the data is high dimensional, the search is plaguedby the so-called “curse of dimensionality” (Indyk and Motwani, 1998). In particular, the distances
between high dimensional points tend to be more uniform, thereby reducing the opportunities forpruning subtrees in the depth-first search.
6.2 Ball Trees for LMNN Training
The most computationally intensive part of LMNN training is computing the gradient of the penalty
for margin violations in Eq. (12). The gradient computation requires a search over all pairs ofdifferently labeled examples to determine if any of them are “impostors” (see section 3.1) that incur
margin violations. The solver described in appendix A reduces the number of these searches bymaintaining an active list of previous margin violations. Nevertheless, this search scales O(n2 d),which is very computationally intensive for large data sets.
Ball trees can be used to further speed up the search for impostors. Recall how impostors were
defined in section 3.1. For any training example ~xi , and for any similarly labeled example ~x j that235

W EINBERGER AND S AUL

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Figure 12: The relative speed-up obtained using ball trees to search for margin violations. The
speed-up was measured on the MNIST data set of handwritten digits, with inputs ofvarying dimensionality derived from PCA. Note how the gains from ball trees diminish
with increasing input dimensionality.

is one of its target k-nearest neighbors (with j i), the impostors consist of all differently labeled
examples ~xl (with yil = 0) that satisfy Eq. (10). Ball trees can be used to search for all training
examples that meet this criterion. As in their use for kNN search, many subtrees in the depth-firstsearch for impostors can be pruned: if for some ball the lower bound distances between examples
is already greater than the right hand side of Eq. (10), then all the examples stored in the subtree
can be ruled out as impostors. Note that for each training example ~xi , we only need to search for
impostors among other training examples ~xl that have a different class label (with yil = 0). Thus,
we build one ball tree data structure per class and perform a separate search for impostors in eachclass.
Fig. 12 shows the relative speed-up when ball trees are used to search for margin violationsin LMNN classification. The figure shows results from experiments with the MNIST images ofhandwritten digits. For these experiments, the images were projected into subspaces of varying
dimensionality using PCA. The gains from ball trees in this context are significant, though not as
dramatic as those in Fig. 10 for simple kNN search. The lesser gains for LMNN classification can be
attributed to the minimum enforced margin of unit distance, which sometimes causes a high numberof sub-trees to be traversed. This effect is controlled by the relative magnitude of the unit margin; it
can be partially offset by scaling the input data by a constant factor before training.
6.3 Ball Trees for LMNN Testing
Ball trees can also be used to accelerate kNN search at test time. We have observed earlier, though,that the speed-up from ball trees diminishes quickly as the input dimensionality increases; see
Fig. 10. If very fast kNN classification using ball trees is desired on a large data set, then often
it is necessary to work with a lower dimensional representation of the training examples.
The most commonly used methods for dimensionality reduction in ball trees are random projections and PCA. Neither of these methods, however, is especially geared to preserve the accuracyof kNN classification. There is an inherent trade-off between dimensionality reduction and nearest236

D ISTANCE M ETRIC L EARNING

3-NN classification after dimensionality reduction
Classification Error in %

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1.82

1.79

1.8

1.81

1.84

30

35

40

45

50

1.5
15

20

25

Input Dimensionality

Figure 13: Graph of kNN classification error (with k = 3) on different low dimensional representations of the MNIST data set; see text for details. The speed-up from ball-trees is shownat the top of the graph.

neighbor preservation. Nearest neighbor relationships can change when the training examples areprojected into a lower dimensional space, resulting in significantly worse kNN classification.
In this section, we explore how the distance metric learned for LMNN classification can be used
for more effective dimensionality reduction in ball trees. In section 5.4, we described two different
ways to derive low dimensional representations for LMNN classification. The first computed a
low-rank approximation to the (generally full rank) matrix L; the second directly learned a lowrank rectangular matrix L by optimizing the non-convex loss function in Eq. (13). For shorthand,
we refer to these approaches for dimensionality reduction as LMNN-S and LMNN-R, denoting
whether a square (S) or rectangular (R) matrix is learned to minimize the LMNN cost function.
Fig. 13 shows the results of kNN classification from both these methods on the MNIST data set of
handwritten digits. For these experiments, the raw MNIST images (of size 28× 28) were projected
onto their 350 leading principal components before any training for LMNN classification. Also
shown in the figure are the results from further dimensionality reduction using PCA, as well as
the baseline kNN error rate in the original (high dimensional) input space. The square matrix in
LMNN-S was of size 350 × 350, and for dimensionality reduction, the data was projected onto ther leading eigenvectors of linear transformation L. The rectangular matrix in LMNN-R was of sizer × 350, where r varied from 15 to 50. The speed-up from ball trees is shown at the top of the graph.
The amount of speed-up depends significantly on the amount of dimensionality reduction, but very
little on the particular method of dimensionality reduction.
The results show that LMNN can be used effectively for dimensionality reduction. For example,
LMNN-R achieves a kNN test error rate of 2.38% in 15 dimensions, only slightly higher than thebaseline error rate of 2.33% in the original input space. In this space, moreover, ball trees yield a
15x speedup over baseline kNN search. In 25 dimensions, the LMNN-R error rate drops further to
1.76% while still yielding a 5.7x speed-up. Of the three methods compared in Fig. 13, LMNN-R is
the most effective. In fact, though working in many fewer dimensions, LMNN-R obtains results very
close to the best results reported in section 4. It is interesting that LMNN-R outperforms LMNN-S,
though (as expected) their results converge as the rectangular matrix in LMNN-R becomes more
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square. These results show that aggressive dimensionality reduction can be combined with highly
accurate kNN classification.

7. Discussion
In this paper, we have introduced a new framework for large margin nearest neighbor (LMNN)
classification. From labeled training examples, we have shown how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification. The required optimization was formulated as an instance ofsemidefinite programming. Our framework makes no parametric assumptions about the structure or
distribution of the data and scales naturally to problems with large number of classes. On multiple
data sets, we have demonstrated that we can significantly improve the accuracy of kNN classification by learning a metric in this way. We have also shown that an alternative energy-based decision
rule typically leads to further improvements over traditional kNN classification.
Beyond the basic framework for LMNN classification, we described several useful and complementary extensions. These included: iterative re-estimation of target neighbor assignments, globally
integrated learning of multiple locally linear metrics, kernel methods for LMNN classification, lowrank distance metrics for dimensionality reduction, and ball trees for more efficient gradient computations (in training) and kNN search (in testing). These extensions can be adapted and combined
to meet the demands of particular applications. For example, to build a highly accurate classifier
without regard to the actual computation at test time, our results suggest to train multiple locallylinear metrics. At the other extreme, to build a kNN classifier that is as fast as possible at test time,
our results suggest to combine low-rank distance metrics with ball trees.
Taken as a whole, our results demonstrate the promise and widespread applicability of LMNN
classification. Perhaps the greatest promise lies in problems with very large numbers of classes, suchas face and identity recognition. The number of classes in these problems can be in the hundreds,
thousands, or more. Nearest neighbor methods handle this regime more transparently than otherleading methods, such as SVMs. The ideas behind LMNN classification have also been extended byothers in various ways (Torresani and Lee, 2007; Kumar et al., 2007). In the appendix, we describe
a simple solver that scales well to problems with tens of thousands of examples. A MATLAB
implementation of the algorithm is also freely available with this paper.
Future work will concentrate on several open problems. The improved performance with multiple metrics suggests that LMNN classification could benefit from even more adaptive transformations of the input space. It would also be useful to study LMMN classification in the semisupervised, transductive setting, where only a few labeled inputs are available for training but the
unlabeled test set is known in advance. Finally, for many real-world applications in computer visionand information retrieval, the data sets can be much larger than the ones we have studied. For verylarge data sets, our current implementation for LMNN does not scale as well as simpler eigenvector
methods such as PCA, LDA, and RCA. It remains an interesting challenge to scale LMNN to evenlarger data sets with millions or more training examples.

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Acknowledgments
We especially thank John C. Blitzer for his many suggestions to improve the algorithm and his
generous help with various data sets. We also thank Koby Crammer for many useful comments andsuggestions. This work was supported by NSF Award 0238323.

Appendix A. Solver
We implemented our own special-purpose solver for large-scale problems in LMNN classification.
Our solver was designed to exploit the particular structure of the cost function in Eq. (13). The solver
iteratively re-estimates the Mahalanobis distance metric as it attempts to minimize the cost function
for LMNN classification. The amount of computation is minimized by careful book-keeping from
one iteration to the next. The speed-ups from these optimizations enabled us to work comfortably
on data sets with up to n = 60, 000 training examples.
Our solver implements an iterative sub-gradient projection method to optimize Eq. (14) in termsof the positive semidefinite matrix M. We refer to the Mahalanobis distance metric at the tth iterationas Mt and to its squared Mahalanobis distance in Eq. (3) as Dt . At each iteration, the optimization
takes a step along the sub-gradient to reduce the loss function and then projects Mt onto the feasible
set. In our case, the feasible set is the cone of all positive semidefinite matrices S+ . The following
sections derive the gradient and describe the projection onto S+ .
It is worth emphasizing that although we can phrase the optimization of Eq. (14) as a semidefinite program (by introducing nonnegative slack variables to model the hinge loss), in practice ourlarge-scale solver works directly to minimize Eq. (14). The hinge losses that appear in this loss
function are not differentiable at all points. Nevertheless, because the loss function is convex, we
can compute its sub-gradient and use standard hill-climbing algorithms to find its minimum. It
has been shown that such sub-gradient methods converge to the correct solution, provided that thegradient step-size is sufficiently small (Boyd and Vandenberghe, 2004).
A.1 Gradient Computation
The gradient computation can be done most efficiently by careful book-keeping from one iteration
to the next. As simplifying notation, let Ci j =(~xi −~x j )(~xi −~x j )⊤ . It is straightforward to express the
distances, as defined in Eq. (3), in terms of this notation. In particular, at the tth iteration, we have
Dt (~xi ,~x j ) = tr(Mt Ci j ). Consequently, we can rewrite the loss function in Eq. (14) as:ε(Mt ) = (1 − µ) ∑ tr(Mt Ci j ) + µ ∑ (1 − yil ) [1 + tr(Mt Ci j )−tr(Mt Cil )]+
i, j

i

j

(18)

i,l

Note that Eq. (18) is piecewise linear with respect to Mt . Let us define a set of triples N t , such that(i, j, l) ∈ N t if and only if the indices (i, j, l) trigger the hinge loss in the second part of Eq. (18).
With this definition, we can write the gradient Gt of ε(Mt ) as:Gt =∂ε= (1 − µ) ∑ Ci j + µ ∑ (Ci j − Cil ) .
Mti, j i(i, j,l)∈N t

Computing the gradient requires computing the outer products in Ci j ; it thus scales quadratically in
the input dimensionality. As the set Nt is potentially very large, a naı̈ve computation of the gradient239

W EINBERGER AND S AUL

would be extremely expensive. However, we can exploit the fact that the gradient contribution fromeach active triplet (i, j, l) does not depend on the degree of its margin violation. Thus, the changes
in the gradient from one iteration to the next are determined entirely by the differences between
the sets Nt and Nt+1 . We can use this fact to derive an extremely efficient update that relates thegradient Gt+1 at iteration t + 1 from the gradient Gt at iteration t. The update simply subtracts
the contributions from triples that are no longer active and adds the contributions of those that justbecame active:(19)
Gt+1 = Gt − µ ∑ (Ci j − Cil ) + µ ∑ (Ci j − Cil ) .
(i, j,l)∈Nt+1 −Nt(i, j,l)∈Nt −Nt+1

For small gradient step sizes, the set Nt changes very little from one iteration to the next. In thiscase, computing the right hand side of Eq. (19) is extremely fast.
To accelerate the solver even further, we adopt an active set method. Note that computing theset Nt at each iteration requires checking every triplet (i, j, l) with j i for a potential margin
violation. This computation scales as O(nd 2 + kn2 d), making it impractical for large data sets. To
avoid this computational burden, we exploit the fact that the great majority of triples do not incur
margin violations: in particular, for each training example, only a very small fraction of differently
labeled examples typically lie nearby in the input space. Consequently, a useful approximation is tocheck only a subset of likely triples for margin violations per gradient computation. We initialize
the training procedure by checking all triples and maintaining an active list of those with margin
violations; however, a full re-check is only made every 10-20 iterations, depending on fluctuationsof the set Nt . For intermediate iterations, we only check for margin violations from among those
active triples accumulated over previous iterations. When the optimization converges, we verify thatthe working set Nt does contain all active triples that incur margin violations. This final check isneeded to ensure convergence to the correct minimum. If the check is not satisfied, the optimization
restarts with the newly expanded active set.
A.2 Projection
The minimization of Eq. (18) must enforce the constraint that the matrix Mt remains positive semidefinite. To enforce this constraint, we project Mt onto the cone of all positive semidefinite matrices
S+ after each gradient step. This projection is computed from the diagonalization of Mt . Let
Mt = V∆V⊤ denote the eigendecomposition of Mt , where V is the orthonormal matrix of eigenvectors and ∆ is the diagonal matrix of corresponding eigenvalues. We can further decompose∆ = ∆− +∆+ , where ∆+ = max(∆, 0) contains all the positive eigenvalues and ∆− = min(∆, 0) contains all the negative eigenvalues. The projection of Mt onto the cone of positive semidefinite
matrices is given by:
PS (Mt ) = V∆+ V⊤ .
(20)
The projection effectively truncates any negative eigenvalues from the gradient step, setting themequal to zero.
A.3 Algorithm
Our gradient projection algorithm combined the update rules for the gradient in Eq. (19) and the
projection in Eq. (20). A simplified pseudo-code implementation is shown in Algorithm 1. We
denote the gradient step-size by α > 0. In practice, it worked best to start with a small value of240

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α. Then, at each iteration, we increased α by a factor of 1.01 if the loss function decreased anddecreased α by a factor of 0.5 if the loss function increased.
Algorithm 1 A simple gradient projection pseudo-code implementation.
1: M0 := I {Initialize with the identity matrix}
2: t := 0{Initialize counter}
3: N (0) , N0 := {}{Initialize active sets}
4: G0 := (1 − µ) ∑i, j i Ci j {Initialize gradient}
5: while (not converged) do
6:
if mod(t, someconstant) = 0 ∨ (almost converged){we used someconstant=10} then7:
compute Nt+1 exactly8:
N (t+1) := N (t) ∪ Nt+1 {Update active set}
9:
else
10:
compute Nt+1 ≈ Nt+1 ∩ N (t) { Only search active set}11:
N (t+1) := N (t) {Keep active set untouched}12:
end if13:
Gt+1 := Gt − µ ∑(i, j,l)∈Nt −Nt+1 (Ci j − Cil ) + µ ∑(i, j,l)∈Nt+1 −Nt (Ci j − Cil )14:
Mt+1 := PS (Mt − αGt+1 ){Take gradient step and project onto SDP cone}15:
t := t + 1
16: end while
17: Output Mt

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