Ensemble approaches of support vector machines for multiclass classification

Abstract

Support vector machine (SVM) which was originally designed for binary classification has achieved superior performance in various classification problems. In order to extend it to multiclass classification, one popular approach is to consider the problem as a collection of binary classification problems. Majority voting or winner-takes-all is then applied to combine those outputs, but it often causes problems to consider tie-breaks and tune the weights of individual classifiers. This paper presents two novel ensemble approaches: probabilistic ordering of one-vs-rest (OVR) SVMs with naïve Bayes classifier and multiple decision templates of OVR SVMs. Experiments with multiclass datasets have shown the usefulness of the ensemble methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.