Training support vector machines using greedy stagewise algorithm

Hard margin support vector machines (HM-SVMs) have a risk of getting overfitting in the presence of the noise. Soft margin SVMs deal with this problem by the introduction of the capacity control term and obtain the state of the art performance. However, this disposal leads to a relatively high computational cost. In this paper, an alternative method, greedy stagewise algorithm, named GS-SVMs is presented, to deal with the overfitting of HM-SVMs without the introduction of capacity. control term. The most attractive property of GS-SVMs is that its computational complexity scales quadratically with the size of training samples in the worst-case. Extensive empirical comparisons confirm the feasibility and validity GS-SVMs.