Randomized kernel methods for least-squares support vector machines

The least-squares support vector machine ( LS-SVM) is a frequently used kernel method for non-linear regression and classification tasks. Here we discuss several approximation algorithms for the LS-SVM classifier. The proposed methods are based on randomized block kernel matrices, and we show that they provide good accuracy and reliable scaling for multi-class classification problems with relatively large data sets. Also, we present several numerical experiments that illustrate the practical applicability of the proposed methods.