A fixed-center spherical separation algorithm with kernel transformations for classification problems

We consider a special case of the optimal separation, via a sphere, of two discrete point sets in a finite dimensional Euclidean space. In fact we assume that the center of the sphere is fixed. In this case the problem reduces to the minimization of a convex and nonsmooth function of just one variable, which can be solved by means of an "ad hoc" method inO(p log p) time, where p is the dataset size. The approach is suitable for use in connection with kernel transformations of the type adopted in the support vector machine (SVM) approach. Despite of its simplicity the method has provided interesting results on several standard test problems drawn from the binary classification literature.