Large-scale maximum margin discriminant analysis using core vector machines.

Large-margin methods, such as support vector machines (SVMs), have been very successful in classification problems. Recently, maximum margin discriminant analysis (MMDA) was proposed that extends the large-margin idea to feature extraction. It often outperforms traditional methods such as kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) and kernel Fisher discriminant analysis (KFD). However, as in the SVM, its time complexity is cubic in the number of training points m, and is thus computationally inefficient on massive data sets. In this paper, we propose an (1+epsilon)(2)-approximation algorithm for obtaining the MMDA features by extending the core vector machine. The resultant time complexity is only linear in m, while its space complexity is independent of m. Extensive comparisons with the original MMDA, KPCA, and KFD on a number of large data sets show that the proposed feature extractor can improve classification accuracy, and is also faster than these kernel-based methods by over an order of magnitude.

Moderating the outputs of support vector machine classifiers.

In this paper, we extend the use of moderated outputs to the support vector machine (SVM) by making use of a relationship between SVM and the evidence framework. The moderated output is more in line with the Bayesian idea that the posterior weight distribution should be taken into account upon prediction, and it also alleviates the usual tendency of assigning overly high confidence to the estimated class memberships of the test patterns. Moreover, the moderated output derived here can be taken as an approximation to the posterior class probability. Hence, meaningful rejection thresholds can be assigned and outputs from several networks can be directly compared. Experimental results on both artificial and real-world data are also discussed.