A comparison of pruning algorithms for sparse least squares support vector machines

Least Squares Support Vector Machines (LS-SVM) is a proven method for classification and function approximation. In comparison to the standard Support Vector Machines (SVM) it only requires solving a linear system, but it lacks sparseness in the number of solution terms. Pruning can therefore be applied. Standard ways of pruning the LS-SVM consist of recursively solving the approximation problem and subsequently omitting data that have a small error in the previous pass and are based on support values. We suggest a slightly adapted variant that improves the performance significantly. We assess the relative regression performance of these pruning schemes in a comparison with two (for pruning adapted) subset selection schemes, -one based on the QR decomposition (supervised), one that searches the most representative feature vector span (unsupervised)-, random omission and backward selection on independent test sets in some benchmark experiments(1).