Outline of the slecture

• Background in Linear Classification Problem
• Support vector machine
• Summary
• References

Background in Linear Classification Problem

    In this section, we will introduce the framework and basic idea of linear classification problem.

    In a linear classification problem, the feature space can be divided into different regions by hyperplanes. In this lecture, we will take a two-catagory case to illustrate. Given training samples $ \textbf{y}_1,\textbf{y}_2,...\textbf{y}_n \in \mathbb{R}^p $, each $ \textbf{y}_i $ is a p-dimensional vector and belongs to either class $ w_1 $ or $ w_2 $. The goal is to find the maximum-margin hyperplane that separate the points in the feature space that belong to class $ w_1 $ from those that belong to class $ w_2 $. The discriminate function can be written as

    We want to find $ \textbf{c}\in\mathbb{R}^{n+1} $ so that a testing data point $ \textbf{y}_i $ is labelled

    We can apply a trick here to replace all $ \textbf{y} $'s in class $ w_2 $ by $ -\textbf{y} $, then the task is looking for $ \textbf{c} $ so that

    You might have already observe the ambiguity of c in the above discussion: if c separates data, $ \lambda \textbf{c} $ also separates the data. One solution might be set $ |\textbf{c}|=1 $. Another solution is to introduce the concept of "margin" which we denote by b, and ask

    In this scenario, the hyperplane is defined by $ \textbf{c}\cdot \textbf{y} = \textbf{b} $. $ \textbf{c} $ is the normal of the plane lying on the positive side of every hyperplane. $ \frac{b_i}{||c||} $ is the distance from each point $ \textbf{y}_i $ to the hyperplane.

    The above approach is equivalent to finding a solution for

where $ \textbf{Y} =\begin{bmatrix} y_1^T \\ y_2^T \\ ... \\ y_n^T \end{bmatrix} $

    In most cases when n>p, it is always impossible to find a solution for c. An alternative approach is to find c that minimize a criterion function $ J(\vec{c}) $. There are variant forms of criterion functions. For example, we can try to minimize the error vector between $ \vec{c}\cdot\vec{y} $ and $ b $, hence the criterion function can be defined as $ J(\vec{c}) = |||| $