The widely used Support Vector Machine (SVM) method has shown to yield very good results in
Supervised Classification problems. Other methods such as Classification Trees have become
more popular among practitioners than SVM thanks to their interpretability, which is an important
issue in Data Mining.
In this work, we propose an SVM-based method that automatically detects the most important
predictor variables, and the role they play in the classifier. In particular, the proposed method is
able to detect those values and intervals which are critical for the classification. The method
involves the optimization of a Linear Programming problem, with a large number of decision
variables. The numerical experience reported shows that a rather direct use of the standard
Column-Generation strategy leads to a classification method which, in terms of classification
ability, is competitive against the standard linear SVM and Classification Trees. Moreover, the
proposed method is robust, i.e., it is stable in the presence of outliers and invariant to change of
scale or measurement units of the predictor variables.
When the complexity of the classifier is an important issue, a wrapper feature selection method is
applied, yielding simpler, still competitive, classifiers
