A comparative study of multi-class support vector machines in the unifying framework of large margin classifiers

摘要

Vapnik's statistical learning theory has mainly been developed for two types of problems: pattern recognition (computation of dichotomies) and regression (estimation of real-valued functions). Only in recent years has multi-class discriminant analysis been studied independently. Extending several standard results, among which a famous theorem by Bartlett, we have derived distribution-free uniform strong laws of large numbers devoted to multi-class large margin discriminant models. The capacity measure appearing in the confidence interval, a covering number, has been bounded from above in terms of a new generalized VC dimension. In this paper, the aforementioned theorems are applied to the architecture shared by all the multi-class SVMs proposed so far, which provides us with a simple theoretical framework to study them, compare their performance and design new machines.