Data-dependent kernels for high-dimensional data classification

For high-dimensional data classification problems such as face recognition, one of the most efficient classifiers is the nearest neighbor (NN) classifier. What mostly affects the NN classification performance is the feature extracted by some methods. And the kernel method is one of the efficient methods for extracting features. However, the selection of kernel parameters is still difficult. In this paper, we propose a so-called data dependent kernel (DDK) which is defined by generalizing the Gaussian kernel. Also an efficient and practical method is presented to calculate the DDK parameters. Moreover, one DDK based on subspaces is given to improve the recognition performance. Experiments show that the proposed DDK can achieve promising classification performance in face recognition and SPECT heart diagnosis.