A parallel and balanced SVM algorithm on spark for data-intensive computing

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a machine learning with excellent classification performance, which has been widely used in various fields such as data mining, text classification, face recognition and etc. However, when data volume scales to a certain level, the computational time becomes too long and the efficiency becomes low. To address this issue, we propose a parallel balanced SVM algorithm based on Spark, named PB-SVM, which is optimized on the basis of the traditional Cascade SVM algorithm. PB-SVM contains three parts, i.e., Clustering Equal Division, Balancing Shuffle and Iteration Termination, which solves the problems of data skew of Cascade SVM and the large difference between local support vector and global support vector. We implement PB-SVM in AliCloud Spark distributed cluster with five kinds of public datasets. Our experimental results show that in the two-classification test on the dataset covtype, compared with MLlib-SVM and Cascade SVM on Spark, PB-SVM improves efficiency by 38.9% and 75.4%, and the accuracy is improved by 7.16% and 8.38%. Moreover, in the multi-classification test, compared with Cascade SVM on Spark on the dataset covtype, PB-SVM improves efficiency and accuracy by 94.8% and 18.26% respectively.