Title
Noise reduction for instance-based learning with a local maximal margin approach
Abstract
To some extent the problem of noise reduction in machine learning has been finessed by the development of learning techniques that are noise-tolerant. However, it is difficult to make instance-based learning noise tolerant and noise reduction still plays an important role in k-nearest neighbour classification. There are also other motivations for noise reduction, for instance the elimination of noise may result in simpler models or data cleansing may be an end in itself. In this paper we present a novel approach to noise reduction based on local Support Vector Machines (LSVM) which brings the benefits of maximal margin classifiers to bear on noise reduction. This provides a more robust alternative to the majority rule on which almost all the existing noise reduction techniques are based. Roughly speaking, for each training example an SVM is trained on its neighbourhood and if the SVM classification for the central example disagrees with its actual class there is evidence in favour of removing it from the training set. We provide an empirical evaluation on 15 real datasets showing improved classification accuracy when using training data edited with our method as well as specific experiments regarding the spam filtering application domain. We present a further evaluation on two artificial datasets where we analyse two different types of noise (Gaussian feature noise and mislabelling noise) and the influence of different class densities. The conclusion is that LSVM noise reduction is significantly better than the other analysed algorithms for real datasets and for artificial datasets perturbed by Gaussian noise and in presence of uneven class densities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1007/s10844-009-0101-z
J. Intell. Inf. Syst.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Noise reduction,Editing techniques,k,-NN,SVM,Locality
Noise reduction,Data mining,Data cleansing,Instance-based learning,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Majority rule,Pattern recognition,Support vector machine,Filter (signal processing),Gaussian,Gaussian noise,Machine learning
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
35
2
0925-9902
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
13
0.70
57
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nicola Segata123424.61
Enrico Blanzieri258152.98
Sarah Jane Delany344629.95
Pádraig Cunningham43086218.37