A Divide-and-Conquer Solver for Kernel Support Vector Machines

The kernel support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most widely used classification methods; however, the amount of computation required becomes the bottleneck when facing millions of samples. In this paper, we propose and analyze a novel divide-and-conquer solver for kernel SVMs (DC-SVM). In the division step, we partition the kernel SVM problem into smaller subproblems by clustering the data, so that each subproblem can be solved independently and efficiently. We show theoretically that the support vectors identified by the subproblem solution are likely to be support vectors of the entire kernel SVM problem, provided that the problem is partitioned appropriately by kernel clustering. In the conquer step, the local solutions from the subproblems are used to initialize a global coordinate descent solver, which converges quickly as suggested by our analysis. By extending this idea, we develop a multilevel Divide-and-Conquer SVM algorithm with adaptive clustering and early prediction strategy, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of training speed, testing accuracy, and memory usage. As an example, on the covtype dataset with half-a-million samples, DC-SVM is 7 times faster than LIBSVM in obtaining the exact SVM solution (to within $10^{-6}$ relative error) which achieves 96.15% prediction accuracy. Moreover, with our proposed early prediction strategy, DC-SVM achieves about 96% accuracy in only 12 minutes, which is more than 100 times faster than LIBSVM

Scale-sensitive Psi-dimensions: the Capacity Measures for Classifiers Taking Values in R^Q

Bounds on the risk play a crucial role in statistical learning theory. They usually involve as capacity measure of the model studied the VC dimension or one of its extensions. In classification, such "VC dimensions" exist for models taking values in {0, 1}, {1,..., Q} and R. We introduce the generalizations appropriate for the missing case, the one of models with values in R^Q. This provides us with a new guaranteed risk for M-SVMs which appears superior to the existing one

Support Vector Machines in High Energy Physics

This lecture will introduce the Support Vector algorithms for classification and regression. They are an application of the so called kernel trick, which allows the extension of a certain class of linear algorithms to the non linear case. The kernel trick will be introduced and in the context of structural risk minimization, large margin algorithms for classification and regression will be presented. Current applications in high energy physics will be discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures. Part of the proceedings of the Track 'Computational Intelligence for HEP Data Analysis' at iCSC 200

Statistical Learning Theory for Location Fingerprinting in Wireless LANs

In this paper, techniques and algorithms developed in the framework of statistical learning theory are analyzed and applied to the problem of determining the location of a wireless device by measuring the signal strengths from a set of access points (location fingerprinting). Statistical Learning Theory provides a rich theoretical basis for the development of models starting from a set of examples. Signal strength measurement is part of the normal operating mode of wireless equipment, in particular Wi-Fi, so that no custom hardware is required. The proposed techniques, based on the Support Vector Machine paradigm, have been implemented and compared, on the same data set, with other approaches considered in the literature. Tests performed in a real-world environment show that results are comparable, with the advantage of a low algorithmic complexity in the normal operating phase. Moreover, the algorithm is particularly suitable for classification, where it outperforms the other techniques

Making Indefinite Kernel Learning Practical

In this paper we embed evolutionary computation into statistical learning theory. First, we outline the connection between large margin optimization and statistical learning and see why this paradigm is successful for many pattern recognition problems. We then embed evolutionary computation into the most prominent representative of this class of learning methods, namely into Support Vector Machines (SVM). In contrast to former applications of evolutionary algorithms to SVM we do not only optimize the method or kernel parameters. We rather use evolution strategies in order to directly solve the posed constrained optimization problem. Transforming the problem into the Wolfe dual reduces the total runtime and allows the usage of kernel functions just as for traditional SVM. We will show that evolutionary SVM are at least as accurate as their quadratic programming counterparts on eight real-world benchmark data sets in terms of generalization performance. They always outperform traditional approaches in terms of the original optimization problem. Additionally, the proposed algorithm is more generic than existing traditional solutions since it will also work for non-positive semidefinite or indefinite kernel functions. The evolutionary SVM variants frequently outperform their quadratic programming competitors in cases where such an indefinite Kernel function is used. --

A complexity analysis of statistical learning algorithms

We apply information-based complexity analysis to support vector machine (SVM) algorithms, with the goal of a comprehensive continuous algorithmic analysis of such algorithms. This involves complexity measures in which some higher order operations (e.g., certain optimizations) are considered primitive for the purposes of measuring complexity. We consider classes of information operators and algorithms made up of scaled families, and investigate the utility of scaling the complexities to minimize error. We look at the division of statistical learning into information and algorithmic components, at the complexities of each, and at applications to support vector machine (SVM) and more general machine learning algorithms. We give applications to SVM algorithms graded into linear and higher order components, and give an example in biomedical informatics