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A Siamese Deep Forest (arxiv.org)
1 point by gfredtech on May 1, 2017 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It pairs input vectors and trains a forest of decision trees, choosing each tree's weight so similar pairs land close together and different ones far apart. Unlike Siamese neural networks, which overfit when data is scarce, this tree-based version aims to avoid that problem.

Abstract

A Siamese Deep Forest (SDF) is proposed in the paper. It is based on the Deep Forest or gcForest proposed by Zhou and Feng and can be viewed as a gcForest modification. It can be also regarded as an alternative to the well-known Siamese neural networks. The SDF uses a modified training set consisting of concatenated pairs of vectors. Moreover, it defines the class distributions in the deep forest as the weighted sum of the tree class probabilities such that the weights are determined in order to reduce distances between similar pairs and to increase them between dissimilar points. We show that the weights can be obtained by solving a quadratic optimization problem. The SDF aims to prevent overfitting which takes place in neural networks when only limited training data are available. The numerical experiments illustrate the proposed distance metric method.

Lev V. Utkin, Mikhail A. Ryabinin
arXiv:1704.08715 · stat.ML, cs.LG · submitted Apr 27, 2017
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