Incremental learning of support vector machines by classifier combining

Abstract

How to acquire new knowledge from new added training data while retaining the knowledge learned before is an important problem for incremental learning. In order to handle this problem, we propose a novel algorithm that enables support vector machines to accommodate new data, including samples that correspond to previously unseen classes, while it retains previously acquired knowledge. Furthermore, our new algorithm does not require access to previously used data during subsequent incremental learning sessions. The proposed algorithm trains a support vector machine that can output posterior probability information once an incremental batch training data is acquired. The outputs of all the resulting support vector machines are simply combined by averaging. Experiments are carried out on three benchmark datasets as well as a real world text categorization task. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm is superior to the traditional incremental learning algorithm, Learn++. Due to the simplicity of the proposed algorithm, it can be used more effectively in practice. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.