Generalized Intersection Kernel

Abstract: Following the very recent line of work on the generalized min-max'' (GMM) kernel, this study proposes thegeneralized intersection'' (GInt) kernel and the related normalized generalized min-max'' (NGMM) kernel. In computer vision, the (histogram) intersection kernel has been popular, and the GInt kernel generalizes it to data which can have both negative and positive entries. Through an extensive empirical classification study on 40 datasets from the UCI repository, we are able to show that this (tuning-free) GInt kernel performs fairly well. The empirical results also demonstrate that the NGMM kernel typically outperforms the GInt kernel. Interestingly, the NGMM kernel has another interpretation --- it is theasymmetrically transformed'' version of the GInt kernel, based on the idea of ``asymmetric hashing''. Just like the GMM kernel, the NGMM kernel can be efficiently linearized through (e.g.,) generalized consistent weighted sampling (GCWS), as empirically validated in our study. Owing to the discrete nature of hashed values, it also provides a scheme for approximate near neighbor search.