Multi-View Maximum Entropy Discrimination

Maximum entropy discrimination (MED) is a general framework for discriminative estimation based on the well known maximum entropy principle, which embodies the Bayesian integration of prior information with large margin constraints on observations. It is a successful combination of maximum entropy learning and maximum margin learning, and can subsume support vector machines (SVMs) as a special case. In this paper, we present a multi-view maximum entropy discrimination framework that is an extension of MED to the scenario of learning with multiple feature sets. Different from existing approaches to exploiting multiple views, such as co-training style algorithms and co-regularization style algorithms, we propose a new method to make use of the distinct views where classification margins from these views are required to be identical. We give the general form of the solution to the multi-view maximum entropy discrimination, and provide an instantiation under a specific prior formulation which is analogical to a multi-view version of SVMs. Experimental results on real-world data sets show the effectiveness of the proposed multi-view maximum entropy discrimination approach.