Support Vector Machine & Its

Applications

A portion (1/3) of Mingyue Tan

the slides are taken from
Prof. Andrew Moores
SVM tutorial at The University of British Columbia
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awm/tutorials Nov 26, 2004
Overview

Intro. to Support Vector Machines (SVM)

Properties of SVM
Applications
Gene Expression Data Classification
Text Categorization if time permits
Discussion
 a
Linear Classifiers
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1 w x + b>0
denotes -1

How would you

classify this data?

w x + b<0
 a
Linear Classifiers
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1
denotes -1

How would you

classify this data?
 a
Linear Classifiers
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1
denotes -1

How would you

classify this data?
 a
Linear Classifiers
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1
denotes -1

Any of these
would be fine..

..but which is
best?
 a
Linear Classifiers
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1
denotes -1

How would you

classify this data?

Misclassified
to +1 class
 a
Classifier Margin
x f yest
f(x,w,b) = sign(w x + b)
denotes +1
denotes -1 Define the margin
of a linear
classifier as the
width that the
boundary could be
increased by
before hitting a
datapoint.
 a
Maximum Margin
x f yest
1. Maximizing the margin is good
accordingf(x,w,b)
to intuition and PAC
= sign(w theory
x+ b)
denotes +1 2. Implies that only support vectors are
denotes -1 important; other The
training examples
maximum
are ignorable.
margin linear
3. Empirically it works very very
classifier iswell.
the
linear classifier
Support Vectors with the, um,
are those
datapoints that maximum margin.
the margin This is the
pushes up
against simplest kind of
SVM (Called an
LSVM)
Linear SVM
Linear SVM Mathematically
x+ M=Margin Width

X-

What we know:
(x x ) w 2
w . x+ + b = +1 M
w . x- + b = -1
w w
w . (x+-x-) = 2
 Linear SVM Mathematically
Goal: 1) Correctly classify all training data
wxi b 1 if yi = +1
wxi b 1 if yi = -1
yi (wxi b) 1 for all i 2
2) Maximize the Margin M
1 t w
same as minimize ww
2
We can formulate a Quadratic Optimization Problem and solve for w and b
1 t
Minimize ( w) w w
2

subject to yi (wxi b) 1 i
Solving the Optimization Problem
Find w and b such that
(w) = wTw is minimized;
and for all {(xi ,yi)}: yi (wTxi + b) 1
Need to optimize a quadratic function subject to linear
constraints.
Quadratic optimization problems are a well-known class of
mathematical programming problems, and many (rather
intricate) algorithms exist for solving them.
The solution involves constructing a dual problem where a
Lagrange multiplier i is associated with every constraint in the
primary problem:

Find 1N such that

Q() =i - ijyiyjxiTxj is maximized and
(1) iyi = 0
(2) i 0 for all i
The Optimization Problem Solution
The solution has the form:
w =iyixi b= yk- wTxk for any xk such that k 0

Each non-zero i indicates that corresponding xi is a

support vector.
Then the classifying function will have the form:
f(x) = iyixiTx + b
Notice that it relies on an inner product between the test
point x and the support vectors xi we will return to this
later.
Also keep in mind that solving the optimization problem
involved computing the inner products xiTxj between all
pairs of training points.
Dataset with noise

denotes +1 Hard Margin: So far we require

all data points be classified correctly
denotes -1
- No training error
What if the training set is
noisy?
- Solution 1: use very powerful
kernels

OVERFITTING!
Soft Margin Classification
Slack variables i can be added to allow
misclassification of difficult or noisy examples.

What should our quadratic

e11 optimization criterion be?
e2 Minimize
R
1
e7 w.w C k
2 k 1
Hard Margin v.s. Soft Margin
The old formulation:
Find w and b such that
(w) = wTw is minimized and for all {(xi ,yi)}
yi (wTxi + b) 1

The new formulation incorporating slack variables:

Find w and b such that

(w) = wTw + Ci is minimized and for all {(xi ,yi)}
yi (wTxi + b) 1- i and i 0 for all i

Parameter C can be viewed as a way to control

overfitting.
Linear SVMs: Overview
The classifier is a separating hyperplane.
Most important training points are support vectors; they
define the hyperplane.
Quadratic optimization algorithms can identify which training
points xi are support vectors with non-zero Lagrangian
multipliers i.
Both in the dual formulation of the problem and in the solution
training points appear only inside dot products:

Find 1N such that

Q() =i - ijyiyjxiTxj is maximized and
(1) iyi = 0
(2) 0 i C for all i

f(x) = iyixiTx + b
Non-linear SVMs
Datasets that are linearly separable with some noise
work out great:
0 x

But what are we going to do if the dataset is just too hard?

0 x
How about mapping data to a higher-dimensional
space:
x2

0 x
Non-linear SVMs: Feature spaces
General idea: the original input space can always be
mapped to some higher-dimensional feature space
where the training set is separable:

: x (x)
The Kernel Trick
The linear classifier relies on dot product between vectors K(xi,xj)=xiTxj
If every data point is mapped into high-dimensional space via some
transformation : x (x), the dot product becomes:
K(xi,xj)= (xi) T(xj)
A kernel function is some function that corresponds to an inner product in
some expanded feature space.
Example:
2-dimensional vectors x=[x1 x2]; let K(xi,xj)=(1 + xiTxj)2,
Need to show that K(xi,xj)= (xi) T(xj):
K(xi,xj)=(1 + xiTxj)2,
= 1+ xi12xj12 + 2 xi1xj1 xi2xj2+ xi22xj22 + 2xi1xj1 + 2xi2xj2
= [1 xi12 2 xi1xi2 xi22 2xi1 2xi2]T [1 xj12 2 xj1xj2 xj22 2xj1 2xj2]
= (xi) T(xj), where (x) = [1 x12 2 x1x2 x22 2x1 2x2]
What Functions are Kernels?
For some functions K(xi,xj) checking that
K(xi,xj)= (xi) T(xj) can be cumbersome.
Mercers theorem:
Every semi-positive definite symmetric function is a kernel
Semi-positive definite symmetric functions correspond to a
semi-positive definite symmetric Gram matrix:

K(x1,x1) K(x1,x2) K(x1,x3) K(x1,xN)

K(x2,x1) K(x2,x2) K(x2,x3) K(x2,xN)
K=

K(xN,x1) K(xN,x2) K(xN,x3) K(xN,xN)
Examples of Kernel Functions
Linear: K(xi,xj)= xi Txj

Polynomial of power p: K(xi,xj)= (1+ xi Txj)p

Gaussian (radial-basis function network):

2
xi x j
K (xi , x j ) exp( )
2 2

Sigmoid: K(xi,xj)= tanh(0xi Txj + 1)

Non-linear SVMs Mathematically
Dual problem formulation:
Find 1N such that
Q() =i - ijyiyjK(xi, xj) is maximized and
(1) iyi = 0
(2) i 0 for all i

The solution is:

f(x) = iyiK(xi, xj)+ b

Optimization techniques for finding is remain the same!

Nonlinear SVM - Overview
SVM locates a separating hyperplane in the
feature space and classify points in that
space
It does not need to represent the space
explicitly, simply by defining a kernel
function
The kernel function plays the role of the dot
product in the feature space.
Properties of SVM
Flexibility in choosing a similarity function
Sparseness of solution when dealing with large data
sets
- only support vectors are used to specify the separating
hyperplane
Ability to handle large feature spaces
- complexity does not depend on the dimensionality of the
feature space
Overfitting can be controlled by soft margin
approach
Nice math property: a simple convex optimization problem
which is guaranteed to converge to a single global solution
Feature Selection
SVM Applications

SVM has been used successfully in many

real-world problems
- text (and hypertext) categorization
- image classification
- bioinformatics (Protein classification,
Cancer classification)
- hand-written character recognition
 Application 1: Cancer Classification
High Dimensional
Genes
- p>1000; n<100
Patients g-1 g-2 g-p
P-1
Imbalanced p-2
.
- less positive samples
p-n
n
K [ x, x ] k ( x, x )
N
Many irrelevant features FEATURE SELECTION

Noisy In the linear case,

wi2 gives the ranking of dim i
SVM is sensitive to noisy (mis-labeled) data
Weakness of SVM
It is sensitive to noise
- A relatively small number of mislabeled examples can
dramatically decrease the performance

It only considers two classes

- how to do multi-class classification with SVM?
- Answer:
1) with output arity m, learn m SVMs
SVM 1 learns Output==1 vs Output != 1

SVM 2 learns Output==2 vs Output != 2

SVM m learns Output==m vs Output != m

2)To predict the output for a new input, just predict with each
SVM and find out which one puts the prediction the furthest
into the positive region.
Application 2: Text Categorization

Task: The classification of natural text (or

hypertext) documents into a fixed number of
predefined categories based on their content.
- email filtering, web searching, sorting documents by
topic, etc..
A document can be assigned to more than
one category, so this can be viewed as a
series of binary classification problems, one
for each category
 Representation of Text
IRs vector space model (aka bag-of-words representation)
A doc is represented by a vector indexed by a pre-fixed
set or dictionary of terms
Values of an entry can be binary or weights

Normalization, stop words, word stems

Doc x => (x)
Text Categorization using SVM

The distance between two documents is (x)(z)

K(x,z) = (x)(z) is a valid kernel, SVM can be

used with K(x,z) for discrimination.

Why SVM?
-High dimensional input space
-Few irrelevant features (dense concept)
-Sparse document vectors (sparse instances)
-Text categorization problems are linearly separable
Some Issues
Choice of kernel
- Gaussian or polynomial kernel is default
- if ineffective, more elaborate kernels are needed
- domain experts can give assistance in formulating appropriate
similarity measures

Choice of kernel parameters

- e.g. in Gaussian kernel
- is the distance between closest points with different
classifications
- In the absence of reliable criteria, applications rely on the use
of a validation set or cross-validation to set such parameters.

Optimization criterion Hard margin v.s. Soft margin

- a lengthy series of experiments in which various parameters
are tested
Additional Resources
An excellent tutorial on VC-dimension and Support
Vector Machines:
C.J.C. Burges. A tutorial on support vector machines for pattern
recognition. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2(2):955-
974, 1998.

The VC/SRM/SVM Bible:

Statistical Learning Theory by Vladimir Vapnik, Wiley-
Interscience; 1998

http://www.kernel-machines.org/
Reference

Support Vector Machine Classification of

Microarray Gene Expression Data, Michael P. S.
Brown William Noble Grundy, David Lin, Nello
Cristianini, Charles Sugnet, Manuel Ares, Jr., David
Haussler
www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mooney/cs391L/svm.ppt
Text categorization with Support Vector
Machines:
learning with many relevant features
T. Joachims, ECML - 98