A SPARSE GREEDY SELF-ADAPTIVE ALGORITHM FOR CLASSIFICATION OF DATA

Kernels have become an integral part of most data classification algorithms. However, the kernel parameters are generally not optimized during learning. In this work a novel adaptive technique called Sequential Function Approximation (SFA) has been developed for classification that determines the values of the control and kernel hyper-parameters during learning. This tool constructs sparse radial basis function networks in a greedy fashion. Experiments were carried out on synthetic and real-world data sets where SFA had comparable performance to other popular classification schemes with parameters optimized by an exhaustive grid search.