  The kernel support vector machine (SVM) is one of the most widely used
classification methods; however, the amount of computation required becomes the
bottleneck when facing millions of samples. In this paper, we propose and
analyze a novel divide-and-conquer solver for kernel SVMs (DC-SVM). In the
division step, we partition the kernel SVM problem into smaller subproblems by
clustering the data, so that each subproblem can be solved independently and
efficiently. We show theoretically that the support vectors identified by the
subproblem solution are likely to be support vectors of the entire kernel SVM
problem, provided that the problem is partitioned appropriately by kernel
clustering. In the conquer step, the local solutions from the subproblems are
used to initialize a global coordinate descent solver, which converges quickly
as suggested by our analysis. By extending this idea, we develop a multilevel
Divide-and-Conquer SVM algorithm with adaptive clustering and early prediction
strategy, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of training
speed, testing accuracy, and memory usage. As an example, on the covtype
dataset with half-a-million samples, DC-SVM is 7 times faster than LIBSVM in
obtaining the exact SVM solution (to within $10^{-6}$ relative error) which
achieves 96.15% prediction accuracy. Moreover, with our proposed early
prediction strategy, DC-SVM achieves about 96% accuracy in only 12 minutes,
which is more than 100 times faster than LIBSVM.

Machine Learning