Fast Bounded Online Gradient Descent Algorithms for Scalable Kernel-Based Online Learning

Kernel-based online learning has often shown state-of-the-art performance for many online learning tasks. It, however, suffers from a major shortcoming, that is, the unbounded number of support vectors, making it nonscalable and unsuitable for applications with large-scale datasets. In this work, we study the problem of bounded kernel-based online learning that aims to constrain the number of support vectors by a predefined budget. Although several algorithms have been proposed in literature, they are neither computationally efficient due to their intensive budget maintenance strategy nor effective due to the use of simple Perceptron algorithm. To overcome these limitations, we propose a framework for bounded kernel-based online learning based on an online gradient descent approach. We propose two efficient algorithms of bounded online gradient descent (BOGD) for scalable kernel-based online learning: (i) BOGD by maintaining support vectors using uniform sampling, and (ii) BOGD++ by maintaining support vectors using nonuniform sampling. We present theoretical analysis of regret bound for both algorithms, and found promising empirical performance in terms of both efficacy and efficiency by comparing them to several well-known algorithms for bounded kernel-based online learning on large-scale datasets. Appearing in Proceedings of the 29 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, 2012. Copyright 2012 by the author(s)/owner(s).