Journal of Machine Learning Research (2005) to appear Submitted 3/05; Published 10?/05 Fast Kernel Classifiers with Online and Active Learning Antoine Bordes
[email protected] NEC Laboratories America, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ08540, USA, and Ecole Sup´erieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75231 Paris CEDEX 05, France. Seyda Ertekin
[email protected] The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA Jason Weston
[email protected] NEC Laboratories America, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ08540, USA. L´eon Bottou
[email protected] NEC Laboratories America, 4 Independence Way, Princeton, NJ08540, USA. Editor: Nello Cristianini Abstract Very high dimensional learning systems become theoretically possible when training ex- amples are abundant. The computing cost then becomes the limiting factor. Any efficient learning algorithm should at least pay a brief look at each example. But should all examples be given equal attention? This contribution proposes an empirical answer. We first presents an online SVM algorithm based on this premise. LASVM yields competitive misclassification rates after a single pass over the training examples, outspeeding state-of-the-art SVM solvers. Then we show how active example selection can yield faster training, higher accuracies, and simpler models, using only a fraction of the training example labels. 1. Introduction Electronic computers have vastly enhanced our ability to compute complicated statistical models. Both theory and practice have adapted to take into account the essential com- promise between the number of examples and the model capacity (Vapnik, 1998). Cheap, pervasive and networked computers are now enhancing our ability to collect observations to an even greater extent.