rca: Relevant Component Analysis
In RECA: Relevant Component Analysis for Supervised Distance Metric Learning

Description Usage Arguments Details Value Note Author(s) References Examples

rca performs relevant component analysis (RCA) for the given data. It takes a data set and a set of positive constraints as arguments and returns a linear transformation of the data space into better representation, alternatively, a Mahalanobis metric over the data space.

The new representation is known to be optimal in an information theoretic sense under a constraint of keeping equivalent data points close to each other.

1	rca(x, chunks, useD = NULL)

`x`	`n * d` matrix or data frame of original data.
`chunks`	a vector of size `N` describing the chunklets: `-1` in the `i`-th place says that point `i` does not belong to any chunklet; integer `j` in place `i` says that point `i` belongs to chunklet `j`; The chunklets indexes should be `1:number-of-chunklets`.
`useD`	optional. When not given, RCA is done in the original dimension and `B` is full rank. When `useD` is given, RCA is preceded by constraints based LDA which reduces the dimension to `useD`. `B` in this case is of rank `useD`.

The three returned objects are just different forms of the same output. If one is interested in a Mahalanobis metric over the original data space, the first argument is all she/he needs. If a transformation into another space (where one can use the Euclidean metric) is preferred, the second returned argument is sufficient. Using A and B are equivalent in the following sense:

if y1 = A * x1, y2 = A * y2 then

(x2 - x1)^T * B * (x2 - x1) = (y2 - y1)^T * (y2 - y1)

A list of the RCA results:

B: The RCA suggested Mahalanobis matrix. Distances between data points x1, x2 should be computed by (x2 - x1)^T * B * (x2 - x1)
RCA: The RCA suggested transformation of the data. The data should be transformed by RCA * data
newX: The data after the RCA transformation. newX = data * RCA

Note that any different sets of instances (chunklets), e.g. {1, 3, 7} and {4, 6}, might belong to the same class and might belong to different classes.

Nan Xiao <https://nanx.me>

Aharon Bar-Hillel, Tomer Hertz, Noam Shental, and Daphna Weinshall (2003). Learning Distance Functions using Equivalence Relations. Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML2003)

library("MASS") # generate synthetic multivariate normal data
set.seed(42)
k <- 100L # sample size of each class
n <- 3L # specify how many classes
N <- k * n # total sample size
x1 <- mvrnorm(k, mu = c(-16, 8), matrix(c(15, 1, 2, 10), ncol = 2))
x2 <- mvrnorm(k, mu = c(0, 0), matrix(c(15, 1, 2, 10), ncol = 2))
x3 <- mvrnorm(k, mu = c(16, -8), matrix(c(15, 1, 2, 10), ncol = 2))
x <- as.data.frame(rbind(x1, x2, x3)) # predictors
y <- gl(n, k) # response

# fully labeled data set with 3 classes
# need to use a line in 2D to classify
plot(x[, 1L], x[, 2L],
  bg = c("#E41A1C", "#377EB8", "#4DAF4A")[y],
  pch = rep(c(22, 21, 25), each = k)
)
abline(a = -10, b = 1, lty = 2)
abline(a = 12, b = 1, lty = 2)

# generate synthetic chunklets
chunks <- vector("list", 300)
for (i in 1:100) chunks[[i]] <- sample(1L:100L, 10L)
for (i in 101:200) chunks[[i]] <- sample(101L:200L, 10L)
for (i in 201:300) chunks[[i]] <- sample(201L:300L, 10L)

chks <- x[unlist(chunks), ]

# make "chunklet" vector to feed the chunks argument
chunksvec <- rep(-1L, nrow(x))
for (i in 1L:length(chunks)) {
  for (j in 1L:length(chunks[[i]])) {
    chunksvec[chunks[[i]][j]] <- i
  }
}

# relevant component analysis
rcs <- rca(x, chunksvec)

# learned transformation of the data
rcs$RCA

# learned Mahalanobis distance metric
rcs$B

# whitening transformation applied to the chunklets
chkTransformed <- as.matrix(chks) %*% rcs$RCA

# original data after applying RCA transformation
# easier to classify - using only horizontal lines
xnew <- rcs$newX
plot(xnew[, 1L], xnew[, 2L],
  bg = c("#E41A1C", "#377EB8", "#4DAF4A")[gl(n, k)],
  pch = c(rep(22, k), rep(21, k), rep(25, k))
)
abline(a = -15, b = 0, lty = 2)
abline(a = 16, b = 0, lty = 2)