Essentials of Pattern Recognition An Accessible Approach

This chapter is not about one particular method (or a family of methods). Instead, it provides a set of tools useful for better pattern recognition, especially for real-world applications. They include the definition of distance metrics, vector norms, a brief introduction to the idea of distance metric learning, and power mean kernels (which is a family of useful metrics). We also establish by examples that proper normalizations of our data are essential, and introduce a few data normalization and transformation methods.