Papers › Supervised Quadratic Feature Analysis: Information Geometry Approach for...

Supervised Quadratic Feature Analysis: Information Geometry Approach for Dimensionality Reduction

31 Jan 2025arXiv:2502.00168archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Herrera-Esposito, Johannes Burge

Supervised dimensionality reduction aims to map labeled data to a low-dimensional feature space while maximizing class discriminability. Directly computing discriminability is often impractical, so an alternative approach is to learn features that maximize a distance or dissimilarity measure between classes. The Fisher-Rao distance is an important information geometry distance in statistical manifolds. It is induced by the Fisher information metric, a tool widely used for understanding neural representations. Despite its theoretical and pratical appeal, Fisher-Rao distances between classes have not been used as a maximization objective in supervised feature learning. Here, we present Supervised Quadratic Feature Analysis (SQFA), a linear dimensionality reduction method that maximizes Fisher-Rao distances between class distributions, by exploiting the information geometry of the symmetric positive definite manifold. SQFA maximizes distances using first- and second-order statistics, and its features allow for quadratic discriminability (i.e. QDA performance) matching or surpassing state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets. We theoretically motivate Fisher-Rao distances as a proxy for quadratic discriminability, and compare its performance to other popular distances (e.g. Wasserstein distances). SQFA provides a flexible state-of-the-art method for dimensionality reduction. Its successful use of Fisher-Rao distances between classes motivates future research directions.

PaperPDFCode

Code

dherrera1911/sqfa officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Dimensionality ReductionMetric LearningSupervised dimensionality reduction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections