Relative Margin Machines

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21 (NIPS 2008)

Bibtex Metadata Paper Supplemental

Authors

Tony Jebara, Pannagadatta Shivaswamy

Abstract

In classification problems, Support Vector Machines maximize the margin of separation between two classes. While the paradigm has been successful, the solution obtained by SVMs is dominated by the directions with large data spread and biased to separate the classes by cutting along large spread directions. This article proposes a novel formulation to overcome such sensitivity and maximizes the margin relative to the spread of the data. The proposed formulation can be efficiently solved and experiments on digit datasets show drastic performance improvements over SVMs.