Neighborhood Components Analysis: Visualizing Metric Learning

Introduction

This article covers the following tech skills:

This lab is aimed at demonstrating the use of Neighborhood Components Analysis (NCA) in learning a distance metric that maximizes the nearest neighbors classification accuracy. It provides a visual representation of this metric compared to the original point space.

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Generate Data Points

We will start by generating a data set of 9 samples from 3 classes, and plot the points in the original space. For this example, we focus on the classification of point no. 3.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn.datasets import make_classification
from sklearn.neighbors import NeighborhoodComponentsAnalysis
from matplotlib import cm
from scipy.special import logsumexp

X, y = make_classification(
    n_samples=9,
    n_features=2,
    n_informative=2,
    n_redundant=0,
    n_classes=3,
    n_clusters_per_class=1,
    class_sep=1.0,
    random_state=0,
)

plt.figure(1)
ax = plt.gca()
for i in range(X.shape[0]):
    ax.text(X[i, 0], X[i, 1], str(i), va="center", ha="center")
    ax.scatter(X[i, 0], X[i, 1], s=300, c=cm.Set1(y[[i]]), alpha=0.4)

ax.set_title("Original points")
ax.axes.get_xaxis().set_visible(False)
ax.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
ax.axis("equal")  # so that boundaries are displayed correctly as circles

Visualize Neighbors

We now visualize the links between the data points, with the thickness of a link between point no. 3 and another point being proportional to their distance.

def link_thickness_i(X, i):
    diff_embedded = X[i] - X
    dist_embedded = np.einsum("ij,ij->i", diff_embedded, diff_embedded)
    dist_embedded[i] = np.inf

    # compute exponentiated distances (use the log-sum-exp trick to
    # avoid numerical instabilities
    exp_dist_embedded = np.exp(-dist_embedded - logsumexp(-dist_embedded))
    return exp_dist_embedded


def relate_point(X, i, ax):
    pt_i = X[i]
    for j, pt_j in enumerate(X):
        thickness = link_thickness_i(X, i)
        if i != j:
            line = ([pt_i[0], pt_j[0]], [pt_i[1], pt_j[1]])
            ax.plot(*line, c=cm.Set1(y[j]), linewidth=5 * thickness[j])


i = 3
relate_point(X, i, ax)
plt.show()

Learn an Embedding

We will now use NCA to learn an embedding and plot the points after the transformation. We then take the embedding and find the nearest neighbors.

nca = NeighborhoodComponentsAnalysis(max_iter=30, random_state=0)
nca = nca.fit(X, y)

plt.figure(2)
ax2 = plt.gca()
X_embedded = nca.transform(X)
relate_point(X_embedded, i, ax2)

for i in range(len(X)):
    ax2.text(X_embedded[i, 0], X_embedded[i, 1], str(i), va="center", ha="center")
    ax2.scatter(X_embedded[i, 0], X_embedded[i, 1], s=300, c=cm.Set1(y[[i]]), alpha=0.4)

ax2.set_title("NCA embedding")
ax2.axes.get_xaxis().set_visible(False)
ax2.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
ax2.axis("equal")
plt.show()

Summary

In this lab, we have demonstrated how to use NCA to learn a distance metric that maximizes the nearest neighbors classification accuracy. We have visualized the links between the data points and compared the original point space with the transformed space.

🚀 Practice Now: Neighborhood Components Analysis

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