Combining Discriminant Models with new Multi-Class SVMs (2000)
| Citations: | 27 - 6 self |
BibTeX
@MISC{Guermeur00combiningdiscriminant,
author = {Yann Guermeur},
title = {Combining Discriminant Models with new Multi-Class SVMs},
year = {2000}
}
Years of Citing Articles
OpenURL
Abstract
The idea of combining models instead of simply selecting the best one, in order to improve performance, is well known in statistics and has a long theoretical background. However, making full use of theoretical results is ordinarily subject to the satisfaction of strong hypotheses (weak correlation among the errors, availability of large training sets, possibility to rerun the training procedure an arbitrary number of times, etc.). In contrast, the practitioner who has to make a decision is frequently faced with the dicult problem of combining a given set of pretrained classiers, with highly correlated errors, using only a small training sample. Overtting is then the main risk, which cannot be overcome but with a strict complexity control of the combiner selected. This suggests that SVMs, which implement the SRM inductive principle, should be well suited for these dicult situations. Investigating this idea, we introduce a new family of multi-class SVMs and assess them as ensemble methods on a real-world problem. This task, protein secondary structure prediction, is an open problem in biocomputing for which model combination appears to be an issue of central importance. Experimental evidence highlights the gain in quality resulting from combining some of the most widely used prediction methods with our SVMs rather than with the ensemble methods traditionally used in the eld. The gain is increased when the outputs of the combiners are post-processed with a simple DP algorithm.







