1. Introduction to Support Vector Machines
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Introduction to Support Vector Machines
Thanks:
Andrew Moore
CMU
And
Martin Law
Michigan State University

2. History of SVM SVM is related to statistical learning theory [3]
SVM was first introduced in 1992 [1]
SVM becomes popular because of its success in handwritten digit recognition
1.1% test error rate for SVM. This is the same as the error rates of a carefully constructed neural network, LeNet 4.
See Section 5.11 in [2] or the discussion in [3] for details
SVM is now regarded as an important example of “kernel methods”, one of the key area in machine learning
First introduced in COLT-92 by Boser, Guyon and Vapnik
COLT = computational learning theory
B. Scholkopf et al. ICANN
[1] B.E. Boser et al. A Training Algorithm for Optimal Margin Classifiers. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Workshop on Computational Learning Theory , Pittsburgh, 1992.
[2] L. Bottou et al. Comparison of classifier methods: a case study in handwritten digit recognition. Proceedings of the 12th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition, vol. 2, pp
[3] V. Vapnik. The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. 2nd edition, Springer, 1999.
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3. f Linear Classifiers yest x Estimation: w: weight vector
f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b)
denotes +1
denotes -1
w: weight vector
x: data vector
How would you classify this data?
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4. f a Linear Classifiers yest x f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b) denotes +1
How would you classify this data?
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5. f a Linear Classifiers yest x f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b) denotes +1
How would you classify this data?
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6. f a Linear Classifiers yest x f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b) denotes +1
How would you classify this data?
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7. f a Linear Classifiers yest x f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b) denotes +1
Any of these would be fine..
..but which is best?
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8. Why Maximum Margin?
f(x,w,b) = sign(w. x - b)
denotes +1
denotes -1
The maximum margin linear classifier is the linear classifier with the, um, maximum margin.
This is the simplest kind of SVM (Called an LSVM)
Support Vectors are those datapoints that the margin pushes up against
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9. Large-margin Decision Boundary
The decision boundary should be as far away from the data of both classes as possible
We should maximize the margin, m
Distance between the origin and the line wtx=-b is b/||w||
Class 2 m
Class 1
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10. Finding the Decision Boundary
Let {x1, ..., xn} be our data set and let yi Î {1,-1} be the class label of xi
The decision boundary should classify all points correctly Þ
To see this: when y=-1, we wish (wx+b)<1, when y=1, we wish (wx+b)>1. For support vectors, we wish y(wx+b)=1.
The decision boundary can be found by solving the following constrained optimization problem
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11. Next step… Optional Converting SVM to a form we can solve
Dual form
Allowing a few errors
Soft margin
Allowing nonlinear boundary
Kernel functions
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12. The Dual Problem (we ignore the derivation)
The new objective function is in terms of ai only
It is known as the dual problem: if we know w, we know all ai; if we know all ai, we know w
The original problem is known as the primal problem
The objective function of the dual problem needs to be maximized!
The dual problem is therefore:
Properties of ai when we introduce the Lagrange multipliers(KKT)
ai[yi(w.xi + b) -1] = 0
The result when we differentiate the original Lagrangian w.r.t. b
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13. The Dual Problem This is a quadratic programming (QP) problem
A global maximum of ai can always be found
w can be recovered by
Let x(1) and x(-1) be two S.V.
Then b = -1/2( w^T x(1) + w^T x(-1) )
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14. Characteristics of the Solution
Many of the ai are zero (see next page for example)
w is a linear combination of a small number of data points
This “sparse” representation can be viewed as data compression as in the construction of knn classifier
xi with non-zero ai are called support vectors (SV)
The decision boundary is determined only by the SV
Let tj (j=1, ..., s) be the indices of the s support vectors. We can write
For testing with a new data z
Compute and classify z as class 1 if the sum is positive, and class 2 otherwise
Note: w need not be formed explicitly
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15. A Geometrical Interpretation
Class 2
a10=0
a8=0.6
a7=0
a2=0
a5=0
a1=0.8
a4=0
So, if change internal points, no effect on the decision boundary
a6=1.4
a9=0
a3=0
Class 1
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16. Allowing errors in our solutions
We allow “error” xi in classification; it is based on the output of the discriminant function wTx+b
xi approximates the number of misclassified samples
Class 1
Class 2
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17. Soft Margin Hyperplane
If we minimize åixi, xi can be computed by
xi are “slack variables” in optimization
Note that xi=0 if there is no error for xi
xi is an upper bound of the number of errors
We want to minimize
C : tradeoff parameter between error and margin
The optimization problem becomes
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18. Extension to Non-linear Decision Boundary
So far, we have only considered large-margin classifier with a linear decision boundary
How to generalize it to become nonlinear?
Key idea: transform xi to a higher dimensional space to “make life easier”
Input space: the space the point xi are located
Feature space: the space of f(xi) after transformation
XOR: x_1, x_2, and we want to transform to x_1^2, x_2^2, x_1 x_2
It can also be viewed as feature extraction from the feature vector x, but now we extract more feature than the number of features in x.
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19. Non-linear SVMs: Feature spaces
General idea: the original input space can always be mapped to some higher-dimensional feature space where the training set is separable:
Φ: x → φ(x)
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20. Choosing the Kernel Function
Probably the most tricky part of using SVM.
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21. Others
Nerual Network
Perceptron核心思想是：首先随便画一条曲线，然后通过error-rate来不断的对分类器进行调整(通过增加或者减少weight)。如果问题本身是linear separalibity的话，用perceptron一定可以学到一个分类器，但可能不止一个(Naïve Bayesian可以确定最优的那个分类器)
Ensemble Learning: generalization performance can often be improved by training not just one predictor, but rather using an ensemble, i.e., a collection of a (finite) number of predictors, all trained for the same task。
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22. Tradeoff Model complexity(capacity) VS Predication(generalization)
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23. Transfer Learning A major assumption in TML:
Traning set and future data:
1. follow the same distribution
2. are in the same feature space
Transfer learning problem definition:
a source task and a target task
1. the source task has sufficient labeled data
2. the target task has limited labeled data
Key assumption in TL:
the source task is related to the target task.
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