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A compression approach to support vector model selection

2002

Technical Report

ei


In this paper we investigate connections between statistical learning theory and data compression on the basis of support vector machine (SVM) model selection. Inspired by several generalization bounds we construct ``compression coefficients'' for SVMs, which measure the amount by which the training labels can be compressed by some classification hypothesis. The main idea is to relate the coding precision of this hypothesis to the width of the margin of the SVM. The compression coefficients connect well known quantities such as the radius-margin ratio R^2/rho^2, the eigenvalues of the kernel matrix and the number of support vectors. To test whether they are useful in practice we ran model selection experiments on several real world datasets. As a result we found that compression coefficients can fairly accurately predict the parameters for which the test error is minimized.

Author(s): von Luxburg, U. and Bousquet, O. and Schölkopf, B.
Number (issue): 101
Year: 2002
Day: 0

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Technical Report (techreport)

Institution: Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Digital: 0
Note: see more detailed JMLR version
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

BibTex

@techreport{1868,
  title = {A compression approach to support vector model selection},
  author = {von Luxburg, U. and Bousquet, O. and Sch{\"o}lkopf, B.},
  number = {101},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  institution = {Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  year = {2002},
  note = {see more detailed JMLR version},
  doi = {}
}