Sparse support vector machine for pattern recognition

Abstract

Support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most popular classification techniques in pattern recognition community. However, because of outliers in the training samples, SVM tends to perform poorly under such circumstances. In this paper, we borrow the idea from compressive sensing by introducing an extra term to the objective function of the standard SVM in order to achieve a sparse representation. Furthermore, instead of using the l0 norm, we adopt the l1 norm in our sparse SVM. In most cases, our method achieves higher classification rates than the standard SVM because of sparser support vectors and is more robust to outliers in the datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed SVM is efficient in pattern recognition applications.