A new generative feature set based on entropy distance for discriminative classification

Score functions induced by generative models extract fixed-dimensions feature vectors from different-length data observations by subsuming the process of data generation, projecting them in highly informative spaces called score spaces. In this way, standard discriminative classifiers such as support vector machines, or logistic regressors are proved to achieve higher performances than a solely generative or discriminative approach. In this paper, we present a novel score space that capture the generative process encoding it in an entropic feature vector. In this way, both uncertainty in the generative model learning step and “local” compliance of data observations with respect to the generative process can be represented. The proposed score space is presented for hidden Markov models and mixture of gaussian and is experimentally validated on standard benchmark datasets; moreover it can be applied to any generative model. Results show how it achieves compelling classification accuracies.