Classifying Large Data Sets Using SVM with Hierarchical Clusters

Support vector machine (SVM) has been a promising method for classification and regression analysis because of its solid mathematical foundation which conveys several salient properties that other methods do not provide. However, despite the prominent properties of SVM, it is not as favored for large-scale data mining as for pattern recognition or machine learning because the training complexity of SVM is highly dependent on the size of a data set. Many real-world data mining applications involve millions or billions of data records where even multiple scans of the entire data are too expensive to perform. This paper presents a new method, Clustering-Based SVM (CB-SVM), which is specifically designed for handling very large data sets. CB-SVM applies a hierarchical micro-clustering algorithm that scans the entire data set only once to provide an SVM with high quality samples that carry the statistical summaries of the data such that the summaries maximize the benefit of learning the SVM. CB-SVM tries to generate the best SVM boundary for very large data sets given limited amount of resources. Our experiments on synthetic and real data sets show that CB-SVM is highly scalable for very large data sets while also generating high classification accuracy.