Nonparametric feature extraction based on Minimax distance

We investigate the use of Minimax distances to extract in a nonparametric way the features that capture the unknown underlying patterns and structures in the data. We develop a general-purpose framework to employ Minimax distances with many machine learning methods that perform on numerical data. For this purpose, first, we compute the pairwise Minimax distances between the objects, using the equivalence of Minimax distances over a graph and over a minimum spanning tree constructed on that. Then, we perform an embedding of the pairwise Minimax distances into a new vector space, such that their squared Euclidean distances in the new space equal to the pairwise Minimax distances in the original space. In the following, we study the case of having multiple pairwise Minimax matrices, instead of a single one. Thereby, we propose an embedding via first summing up the centered matrices and then performing an eigenvalue decomposition. Finally, we perform several experimental studies to illustrate the effectiveness of our framework.