Exploiting Separability in Large Scale Linear Support Vector Machine Training

Technical Report MS-07-002

Kristian Woodsend and J. Gondzio

Abstract
Support vector machine training can be represented as a large quadratic program. We present an efficient and numerically stable algorithm for this problem using interior point methods, which requires only order n operations per iteration. Through exploiting the separability of the Hessian, we provide a unified approach, from an optimization perspective, to 1-norm classification, 2-norm classification and epsilon-insensitive regression. Numerical experiments indicate that, in contrast to existing decomposition methods, the algorithm is largely unaffected by noisy data, for both linear and non-linear kernels, and they show our implementation outperforming all known implementations by a large margin. We discuss the effect of using multiple correctors, and monitoring the angle of the normal to the hyperplane to determine termination.

Key words: Support vector machines, Interior point method, Separable quadratic program, Large Scale.


Text
PDF MS07-002.pdf.
History:
Written: August 7, 2007, revised July 4, 2008 and April 9, 2009.
Computational Optimization and Applications 49 (2011) 241–269.

Related Software:
HOPDM Higher Order Primal Dual Method.