Minimal Complexity Support Vector Machines for Pattern Classification

Minimal complexity machines (MCMs) minimize the VC (Vapnik-Chervonenkis) dimension to obtain high generalization abilities. However, because the regularization term is not included in the objective function, the solution is not unique. In this paper, to solve this problem, we discuss fusing the MCM and the standard support vector machine (L1 SVM). This is realized by minimizing the maximum margin in the L1 SVM. We call the machine Minimum complexity L1 SVM (ML1 SVM). The associated dual problem has twice the number of dual variables and the ML1 SVM is trained by alternatingly optimizing the dual variables associated with the regularization term and with the VC dimension. We compare the ML1 SVM with other types of SVMs including the L1 SVM using several benchmark datasets and show that the ML1 SVM performs better than or comparable to the L1 SVM.