  Graph-based methods provide a powerful tool set for many non-parametric
frameworks in Machine Learning. In general, the memory and computational
complexity of these methods is quadratic in the number of examples in the data
which makes them quickly infeasible for moderate to large scale datasets. A
significant effort to find more efficient solutions to the problem has been
made in the literature. One of the state-of-the-art methods that has been
recently introduced is the Variational Dual-Tree (VDT) framework. Despite some
of its unique features, VDT is currently restricted only to Euclidean spaces
where the Euclidean distance quantifies the similarity. In this paper, we
extend the VDT framework beyond the Euclidean distance to more general Bregman
divergences that include the Euclidean distance as a special case. By
exploiting the properties of the general Bregman divergence, we show how the
new framework can maintain all the pivotal features of the VDT framework and
yet significantly improve its performance in non-Euclidean domains. We apply
the proposed framework to different text categorization problems and
demonstrate its benefits over the original VDT.
