  Learning a distance metric from the given training samples plays a crucial
role in many machine learning tasks, and various models and optimization
algorithms have been proposed in the past decade. In this paper, we generalize
several state-of-the-art metric learning methods, such as large margin nearest
neighbor (LMNN) and information theoretic metric learning (ITML), into a kernel
classification framework. First, doublets and triplets are constructed from the
training samples, and a family of degree-2 polynomial kernel functions are
proposed for pairs of doublets or triplets. Then, a kernel classification
framework is established, which can not only generalize many popular metric
learning methods such as LMNN and ITML, but also suggest new metric learning
methods, which can be efficiently implemented, interestingly, by using the
standard support vector machine (SVM) solvers. Two novel metric learning
methods, namely doublet-SVM and triplet-SVM, are then developed under the
proposed framework. Experimental results show that doublet-SVM and triplet-SVM
achieve competitive classification accuracies with state-of-the-art metric
learning methods such as ITML and LMNN but with significantly less training
time.
