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Sören Sonnenburg and Vojtech Franc (2010)
COFFIN : A Computational Framework for Linear SVMs
In: Proc. ICML 2010.
In a variety of applications, kernel machines such
as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been
used with great success often delivering stateof-
the-art results. Using the kernel trick, they
work on several domains and even enable heterogeneous
data fusion by concatenating feature
spaces or multiple kernel learning. Unfortunately,
they are not suited for truly large-scale applications
since they suffer from the curse of supporting
vectors, i.e., the speed of applying SVMs
decays linearly with the number of support vectors.
In this paper we develop COFFIN —a new
training strategy for linear SVMs that effectively
allows the use of on demand computed kernel
feature spaces and virtual examples in the primal.
With linear training and prediction effort
this framework leverages SVM applications to
truly large-scale problems: As an example, we
train SVMs for human splice site recognition involving
50 million examples and sophisticated
string kernels. Additionally, we learn an SVM
based gender detector on 5 million examples on
low-tech hardware and achieve beyond the stateof-
the-art accuracies on both tasks. Source code,
data sets and scripts are freely available from
http://sonnenburgs.de/soeren/coffin.
