Large Margin DAGs for Multiclass Classification

We present a new learning architecture: the Decision Directed Acyclic Graph (DDAG), which is used to combine many two-class classifiers into a multiclass classifier. For an N -class problem, the DDAG contains N(N-1)/2 classifiers, one for each pair of classes. We present a VC analysis of the case when the node classifiers are hyperplanes; the resulting boundon the test error depends on N and on the margin achieved at the nodes, but not on the dimension of the space. This motivates an algorithm, DAGSVM, which operates in a kernel-induced feature space and uses two-class maximal margin hyperplanes at each decision-node of the DDAG. The DAGSVM is substantially faster to train and evaluate thaneither the standard algorithm or Max Wins, while maintaining comparable accuracy to both of these algorithms. 1 Introduction The problem of multiclass classificatIon, especially for systems like SVMs, doesn't present an easy solution. It is generally simpler to construct classifier theory and algorithms for two mutually-exclusive classes than for N mutually-exclusive classes.