Large Margin DAGs for Multiclass Classification

We present a new learning architecture: the Decision Directed Acyclic Graph (DDAG), which is used to combine many two-class classifiers into a multiclass classifier. For an -class problem, the DDAG contains classifiers, one for each pair of classes. We present a VC analysis of the case when the node classifiers are hyperplanes; the resulting bound on the test error depends on and on the margin achieved at the nodes, but not on the dimension of the space. This motivates an algorithm, DAGSVM, which operates in a kernel-induced feature space and uses two-class maximal margin hyperplanes at each decision-node of the DDAG. The DAGSVM is substantially faster to train and evaluate than either the standard algorithm or Max Wins, while maintaining comparable accuracy to both of these algorithms.