The time complexity of support vector machines (SVMs) prohibits training on huge data sets with millions of samples. Recently, multilevel approaches to train SVMs have been developed to allow for time efficient training on huge data sets. While regular SVMs perform the entire training in one - time consuming - optimization step, multilevel SVMs first build a hierarchy of problems decreasing in size that resemble the original problem and then train an SVM model for each hierarchy level benefiting from the solved models of previous levels. We present a faster multilevel support vector machine that uses a label propagation algorithm to construct the problem hierarchy. Extensive experiments show that our new algorithm achieves speed-ups up to two orders of magnitude while having similar or better classification quality over state-of-the-art algorithms.
There has been a amount of research on machine learning and support vector machines so that we refer the reader to existing literature @cite_29 @cite_23 @cite_0 for most of the material. Here, we focus on issues closely related to our main contributions and previous work on the problem.
@cite_0 @cite_29 @cite_23
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Support vector machines have met with significant success in numerous real-world learning tasks. However, like most machine learning algorithms, they are generally applied using a randomly selected training set classified in advance. In many settings, we also have the option of using pool-based active learning. Instead of using a randomly selected training set, the learner has access to a pool of unlabeled instances and can request the labels for some number of them. We introduce a new algorithm for performing active learning with support vector machines, i.e., an algorithm for choosing which instances to request next. We provide a theoretical motivation for the algorithm using the notion of a version space. We present experimental results showing that employing our active learning method can significantly reduce the need for labeled training instances in both the standard inductive and transductive settings. My first exposure to Support Vector Machines came this spring when heard Sue Dumais present impressive results on text categorization using this analysis technique. This issue's collection of essays should help familiarize our readers with this interesting new racehorse in the Machine Learning stable. Bernhard Scholkopf, in an introductory overview, points out that a particular advantage of SVMs over other learning algorithms is that it can be analyzed theoretically using concepts from computational learning theory, and at the same time can achieve good performance when applied to real problems. Examples of these real-world applications are provided by Sue Dumais, who describes the aforementioned text-categorization problem, yielding the best results to date on the Reuters collection, and Edgar Osuna, who presents strong results on application to face detection. Our fourth author, John Platt, gives us a practical guide and a new technique for implementing the algorithm efficiently. We introduce a semi-supervised support vector machine (S3VM) method. Given a training set of labeled data and a working set of unlabeled data, S3VM constructs a support vector machine using both the training and working sets. We use S3VM to solve the transduction problem using overall risk minimization (ORM) posed by Vapnik. The transduction problem is to estimate the value of a classification function at the given points in the working set. This contrasts with the standard inductive learning problem of estimating the classification function at all possible values and then using the fixed function to deduce the classes of the working set data. We propose a general S3VM model that minimizes both the misclassification error and the function capacity based on all the available data. We show how the S3VM model for 1-norm linear support vector machines can be converted to a mixed-integer program and then solved exactly using integer programming. Results of S3VM and the standard 1-norm support vector machine approach are compared on ten data sets. Our computational results support the statistical learning theory results showing that incorporating working data improves generalization when insufficient training information is available. In every case, S3VM either improved or showed no significant difference in generalization compared to the traditional approach. Real-world datasets commonly have issues with data imbalance. There are several approaches such as weighting, sub-sampling, and data modeling for handling these data. Learning in the presence of data imbalances presents a great challenge to machine learning. Techniques such as support-vector machines have excellent performance for balanced data, but may fail when applied to imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we propose a new undersampling technique for selecting instances from the majority class. The performance of this approach was evaluated in the context of several real biological imbalanced data. The ratios of negative to positive samples vary from 9:1 to 100:1. Useful classifiers have high sensitivity and specificity. Our results demonstrate that the proposed selection technique improves the sensitivity compared to weighted support-vector machine and available results in the literature for the same datasets.