Support vector machines with the known feature-evolution priors

Abstract

In traditional SVMs (support vector machines), each feature involved in an object is assumed to contribute equally to the classification accuracy. However, the equal importance assumption for each feature is inappropriate for classifying the objects. The existing weighting strategies usually utilize the fixed scaling factors to measure the importance of each feature and hence they are not good fits for feature evolution. In this paper, with the assumption that a Known Feature-Evolution Prior (KFEP) can be employed to capture importance distribution from the perspective of both feature granularity and object granularity, SVM-based machines called KFEP-SVMs are developed to capture the importance of features dynamically. Also, it is revealed that SVMs with the known feature-evolution priors are equivalent to SVMs on a higher feature space. Besides, we theoretically demonstrate that the proposed machines KFEP-SVMs with the known feature-evolution prior indeed have enhanced generalization ability, compared with the classic SVMs. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed machines KFEP-SVMs.