Escaping the Convex Hull with Extrapolated Vector Machines

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)

Bibtex Metadata Paper

Authors

Patrick Haffner

Abstract

Maximum margin classifiers such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) critically depends upon the convex hulls of the training samples of each class, as they implicitly search for the minimum distance between the convex hulls. We propose Extrapolated Vec(cid:173) tor Machines (XVMs) which rely on extrapolations outside these convex hulls. XVMs improve SVM generalization very significantly on the MNIST [7] OCR data. They share similarities with the Fisher discriminant: maximize the inter-class margin while mini(cid:173) mizing the intra-class disparity.