Fast Training of Structured SVM Using Fixed-Threshold Sequential Minimal Optimization

In this paper, we describe a fixed-threshold sequential minimal optimization (FSMO) for structured SVM problems. FSMO is conceptually simple, easy to implement, and faster than the standard support vector machine (SVM) training algorithms for structured SVM problems. Because FSMO uses the fact that the formulation of structured SVM has no bias (that is, the threshold b is fixed at zero), FSMO breaks down the quadratic programming (QP) problems of structured SVM into a series of smallest QP problems, each involving only one variable. By involving only one variable, FSMO is advantageous in that each QP sub-problem does not need subset selection. For the various test sets, FSMO is as accurate as an existing structured SVM implementation (SVM-Struct) but is much faster on large data sets. The training time of FSMO empirically scales between O(n) and O(n(1.2)), while SVM-Struct scales between O(n(1.5)) and O(n(1.8)).