Attempting to model human categorization and similarity judgements is both a very interesting but also an exceedingly difficult challenge. Some of the difficulty arises because of conflicting evidence whether human categorization and similarity judgements should or should not be modelled as to operate on a mental representation that is essentially metric. Intuitively, this has a strong appeal as it would allow (dis)similarity to be represented geometrically as distance in some internal space. Here we show how a single stimulus, carefully constructed in a psychophysical experiment, introduces l2 violations in what used to be an internal similarity space that could be adequately modelled as Euclidean. We term this one influential data point a conflictual judgement. We present an algorithm of how to analyse such data and how to identify the crucial point. Thus there may not be a strict dichotomy between either a metric or a non-metric internal space but rather degrees to which potentially large subsets of stimuli are represented metrically with a small subset causing a global violation of metricity.

For several major applications of data analysis, objects are often not represented as feature vectors in a vector space, but rather by a matrix gathering pairwise proximities. Such pairwise data often violates metricity and, therefore, cannot be naturally embedded in a vector space. Concerning the problem of unsupervised structure detection or clustering, in this paper, a new embedding method for pairwise data into Euclidean vector spaces is introduced. We show that all clustering methods, which are invariant under additive shifts of the pairwise proximities, can be reformulated as grouping problems in Euclidian spaces. The most prominent property of this constant shift embedding framework is the complete preservation of the cluster structure in the embedding space. Restating pairwise clustering problems in vector spaces has several important consequences, such as the statistical description of the clusters by way of cluster prototypes, the generic extension of the grouping procedure to a discriminative prediction rule, and the applicability of standard preprocessing methods like denoising or dimensionality reduction.

Pairwise data in empirical sciences typically violate metricity, ei(cid:173) ther due to noise or due to fallible estimates, and therefore are hard to analyze by conventional machine learning technology. In this paper we therefore study ways to work around this problem. First, we present an alternative embedding to multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) that allows us to apply a variety of classical ma(cid:173) chine learning and signal processing algorithms. The class of pair(cid:173) wise grouping algorithms which share the shift-invariance property is statistically invariant under this embedding procedure, leading to identical assignments of objects to clusters. Based on this new vectorial representation, denoising methods are applied in a sec(cid:173) ond step. Both steps provide a theoretically well controlled setup to translate from pairwise data to the respective denoised met(cid:173) ric representation. We demonstrate the practical usefulness of our theoretical reasoning by discovering structure in protein sequence data bases, visibly improving performance upon existing automatic methods.