We propose the framework of mutual information kernels for learning covariance kernels, as used in Support Vector machines and Gaussian process classifiers, from unlabeled task data using Bayesian techniques. We describe an implementation of this framework which uses variational Bayesian mixtures of factor analyzers in order to attack classification problems in high-dimensional spaces where labeled data is sparse, but unlabeled data is abundant.

Maximum margin classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) critically depends upon the convex hulls of the training samples of each class, as they implicitly search for the minimum distance between the convex hulls. We propose Extrapolated Vector Machines (XVMs) which rely on extrapolations outside these convex hulls. XVMs improve SVM generalization very significantly on the MNIST [7] OCR data. They share similarities with the Fisher discriminant: maximize the inter-class margin while minimizing the intra-class disparity.

We propose a framework based on a parametric quadratic programming (QP) technique to solve the support vector machine (SVM) training problem. This framework, can be specialized to obtain two SVM optimization methods. The first solves the fixed bias problem, while the second starts with an optimal solution for a fixed bias problem and adjusts the bias until the optimal value is found. The later method can be applied in conjunction with any other existing technique which obtains a fixed bias solution. Moreover, the second method can also be used independently to solve the complete SVM training problem. A combination of these two methods is more flexible than each individual method and, among other things, produces an incremental algorithm which exactly solve the 1-Norm Soft Margin SVM optimization problem. Applying Selective Sampling techniques may further boost convergence.

In this paper we introduce a new sparseness inducing prior which does not involve any (hyper)parameters that need to be adjusted or estimated. Although other applications are possible, we focus here on supervised learning problems: regression and classification. Experiments with several publicly available benchmark data sets show that the proposed approach yields state-of-the-art performance. In particular, our method outperforms support vector machines and performs competitively with the best alternative techniques, both in terms of error rates and sparseness, although it involves no tuning or adjusting of sparsenesscontrolling hyper-parameters.

This article presents a Support Vector Machine (SVM) like learning system to handle multi-label problems. Such problems are usually decomposed into many two-class problems but the expressive power of such a system can be weak [5, 7]. We explore a new direct approach. It is based on a large margin ranking system that shares a lot of common properties with SVMs. We tested it on a Yeast gene functional classification problem with positive results.

The nearest neighbor technique is a simple and appealing method to address classification problems. It relies on the assumption of locally constant class conditional probabilities. This assumption becomes invalid in high dimensions with a finite number of examples due to the curse of dimensionality. We propose a technique that computes a locally flexible metric by means of Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The maximum margin boundary found by the SVM is used to determine the most discriminant direction over the query's neighborhood. Such direction provides a local weighting scheme for input features.

However, SVMs require to solve a quadratic optimization problem which needs resources that are at least quadratic in the number of training examples, and it is thus hopeless to try solving problems having millions of examples using classical SVMs. In order to overcome this drawback, we propose in this paper to use a mixture of several SVMs, each of them trained only on a part of the dataset. The idea of an SVM mixture is not new, although previous attempts such as Kwok's paper on Support Vector Mixtures [5] did not train the SVMs on part of the dataset but on the whole dataset and hence could not overcome the'Part of this work has been done while Ronan Collobert was at IDIAP, CP 592, rue du Simplon 4, 1920 Martigny, Switzerland.

The choice of an SVM kernel corresponds to the choice of a representation of the data in a feature space and, to improve performance, it should therefore incorporate prior knowledge such as known transformation invariances. We propose a technique which extends earlier work and aims at incorporating invariances in nonlinear kernels. We show on a digit recognition task that the proposed approach is superior to the Virtual Support Vector method, which previously had been the method of choice. 1 Introduction In some classification tasks, an a priori knowledge is known about the invariances related to the task. For instance, in image classification, we know that the label of a given image should not change after a small translation or rotation.

We develop an intuitive geometric framework for support vector regression (SVR). By examining when ɛ-tubes exist, we show that SVR can be regarded as a classification problem in the dual space. Hard and soft ɛ-tubes are constructed by separating the convex or reduced convex hulls respectively of the training data with the response variable shifted up and down by ɛ. A novel SVR model is proposed based on choosing the max-margin plane between the two shifted datasets.

It is well known that correct choices of hyperparameters in classification and regression tasks can optimize the complexity of the data model, and hence achieve the best generalization [1]. In recent years various methods have been proposed to estimate the optimal hyperparameters in different contexts, such as neural networks [2], support vector machines [3, 4, 5] and Gaussian processes [5]. Most of these methods are inspired by the technique of cross-validation or its variant, leave-one-out validation. While the leave-one-out procedure gives an almost unbiased estimate of the generalization error, it is nevertheless very tedious. Many of the mentioned attempts aimed at approximating this tedious procedure without really having to sweat through it.