Theory and Applications of Clifford Support Vector Machines

This paper introduces the Clifford Support Vector Machines (CSVM) as a generalization of the real- and complex-valued Support Vector Machines using the Clifford geometric algebra. In this framework we handle the design of kernels involving the Clifford or geometric product for linear and nonlinear classification and regression. The major advantage of our approach is that we redefine the optimization variables as multivectors. This allows us to have a multivector as output therefore we can represent multiple classes according to the dimension of the geometric algebra in which we work. We conduct comparisons between CSVM and the most used approaches to solve multi-class classification to show that our approach is more suitable for practical use on certain type of multi-class classification problems.