Learning using privileged information in prototype based models

In some pattern analysis problems, there exists expert knowledge, in addition to the original data involved in the classification process. Most of existing approaches ignore such auxiliary (privileged) knowledge. Recently a new learning paradigm - Learning Using Hidden Information - was introduced in the SVM+ framework. This approach is formulated for binary classification and, as typical for many kernel based methods, can scale unfavorably with the number of training examples. In this contribution we present a more direct novel methodology, based on a prototype metric learning model, for incorporation of valuable privileged knowledge. This is done by changing the global metric in the input space, based on distance relations revealed by the privileged information. Our method achieves competitive performance against the SVM+ formulations. We also present a successful application of our method to a large scale multi-class real world problem of galaxy morphology classification.