Abstract

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) for regression problems are trained by solving a quadratic optimization problem which needs on the order of l 2 memory and time resources to solve, where l is the number of training examples. In this paper, we propose a decomposition algorithm, SVMTorch 1 , which is similar to SVM-Light proposed by Joachims (1999) for classification problems, but adapted to regression problems. With this algorithm, one can now efficiently solve large-scale regression problems (more than 20000 examples). Comparisons with Nodelib, another publicly available SVM algorithm for large-scale regression problems from Flake and Lawrence (2000) yielded significant time improvements. Finally, based on a recent paper from Lin (2000), we show that a convergence proof exists for our algorithm. 1. Introduction Vapnik (1995) has proposed a method to solve regression problems using support vector machines. It has yielded excellent performance on many regression and time ser...

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