Design of Decision Tree via Kernelized Hierarchical Clustering for Multiclass Support Vector Machines

As a very effective method for universal purpose pattern recognition, support vector machine (SVM) was proposed for dichotomic classification problem, which exhibits a remarkable resistance to overfitting, a feature explained by the fact that it directly implements the principle of structural risk minimization. However, in real world, most of classification problems consist of multiple categories. In an attempt to extend the binary SVM classifier for multiclass classification, decision-tree-based multiclass SVM was proposed recently, in which the structure of decision tree plays an important role in minimizing the classification error. The present study aims at developing a systematic way for the design of decision tree for multiclass SVM. Kernel-induced distance function between datasets was discussed and then kernelized hierarchical clustering was developed and used in determining the structure of decision tree. Further, simulation results on satellite image interpretation show the superiority of the proposed classification strategy over the conventional multiclass SVM algorithms.