Support Vector Machines: Training and Applications Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Support Vector Machines 2

The Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a new and very promising classiication technique developed by Vapnik and his group at AT&T Bell Laboratories 3, 6, 8, 24]. This new learning algorithm can be seen as an alternative training technique for Polynomial, Radial Basis Function and Multi-Layer Perceptron classiiers. The main idea behind the technique is to separate the classes with a surface that maximizes the margin between them. An interesting property of this approach is that it is an approximate implementation of the Structural Risk Minimization (SRM) induction principle 23]. The derivation of Support Vector Machines, its relationship with SRM, and its geometrical insight, are discussed in this paper. Since Structural Risk Minimization is an inductive principle that aims at minimizing a bound on the generalization error of a model, rather than minimizing the Mean Square Error over the data set (as Empirical Risk Minimization methods do), training a SVM to obtain the maximum margin classiier requires a diierent objective function. This objective function is then optimized by solving a large-scale quadratic programming problem with linear and box constraints. The problem is considered challenging, because the quadratic form is completely dense, so the memory needed to store the problem grows with the square of the number of data points. Therefore, training problems arising in some real applications with large data sets are impossible to load into memory, and cannot be solved using standard non-linear constrained optimization algorithms. We present a decomposition algorithm that can be used to train SVM's over large data sets. The main idea behind the decomposition is the iterative solution of sub-problems and the evaluation of, and also establish the stopping criteria for the algorithm. We present previous approaches, as well as results and important details of our implementation of the algorithm using a second-order variant of the Reduced Gradient Method as the solver of the sub-problems. As an application of SVM's, we present preliminary results in Frontal Human Face Detection in images. This application opens many interesting questions and future research opportunities, both in the context of faster and better optimization algorithms, and in the use of SVM's in other pattern classiication, recognition, and detection applications.