An experimental study of the combination of meta-learning with particle swarm algorithms for SVM parameter selection

Abstract

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have become a well succeed algorithm due to the good performance it achieves on different learning problems. However, to perform well the SVM formulation requires adjustments on its model. Avoiding the trial and error procedure, the automatic SVM parameter selection is a way to deal with this. The automatic parameter selection is commonly considered an optimization problem whose goal is to find suitable configuration of parameters which attends some learning problem. In the current work, we propose a study of the combination of Meta-learning (ML) with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithms to optimize the SVM model, seeking for combinations of parameters which maximize the success rate of SVM. ML is used to recommend SVM parameters, to a given input problem, based on well-succeeded parameters adopted in previous similar problems. In this combination, initial solutions provided by ML are possibly located in good regions in the search space. Hence, using a reduced number of candidate search points, in the search process, to find an adequate solution, would be less expensive. In our work, we implemented five benchmarks PSO approaches applied to select two SVM parameters for classification. The experiments consist in comparing the performance of the search algorithms using a traditional random initialization and using ML suggestions as initial population. This research analysed the influence of meta-learning on convergence of the optimization algorithms, verifying that the combination of PSO techniques with ML obtained solutions with higher quality on a set of 40 classification problems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.