Large margin classifiers based on affine hulls

This paper introduces a geometrically inspired large margin classifier that can be a better alternative to the support vector machines (SVMs) for the classification problems with limited number of training samples. In contrast to the SVM classifier, we approximate classes with affine hulls of their class samples rather than convex hulls. For any pair of classes approximated with affine hulls, we introduce two solutions to find the best separating hyperplane between them. In the first proposed formulation, we compute the closest points on the affine hulls of classes and connect these two points with a line segment. The optimal separating hyperplane between the two classes is chosen to be the hyperplane that is orthogonal to the line segment and bisects the line. The second formulation is derived by modifying the v SVM formulation. Both formulations are extended to the nonlinear case by using the kernel trick. Based on our findings, we also develop a geometric interpretation of the least squares SVM classifier and show that it is a special case of the proposed method. Multi-class classification problems are dealt with constructing and combining several binary classifiers as in SVM. The experiments on several databases show that the proposed methods work as good as the SVM classifier if not any better. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.