We give two provably accurate feature-selection techniques for the linear
SVM. The algorithms run in deterministic and randomized time respectively. Our
algorithms can be used in an unsupervised or supervised setting. The supervised
approach is based on sampling features from support vectors. We prove that the
margin in the feature space is preserved to within ϵ-relative error of
the margin in the full feature space in the worst-case. In the unsupervised
setting, we also provide worst-case guarantees of the radius of the minimum
enclosing ball, thereby ensuring comparable generalization as in the full
feature space and resolving an open problem posed in Dasgupta et al. We present
extensive experiments on real-world datasets to support our theory and to
demonstrate that our method is competitive and often better than prior
state-of-the-art, for which there are no known provable guarantees.Comment: Appearing in Proceedings of 18th AISTATS, JMLR W&CP, vol 38, 201