Kernel trees for support vector machines

The support vector machines (SVMs) are one of the most effective classification techniques in several knowledge discovery and data mining applications. However, a SVM requires the user to set the form of its kernel function and parameters in the function, both of which directly affect to the performance of the classifier. This paper proposes a novel method, named a kernel-tree, the function of which is composed of multiple kernels in the form of a tree structure. The optimal kernel tree structure and its parameters is determined by genetic programming (GP). To perform a fine setting of kernel parameters, the gradient descent method is used. To evaluate the proposed method, benchmark datasets from UCI and dataset of text classification are applied. The result indicates that the method can find a better optimal solution than the grid search and the gradient search.