Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ho-Nguyen, Nam, Kılınç-Karzan, Fatma, Nguyen, Ellie, Shen, Lingqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912602381090816
author Ho-Nguyen, Nam
Kılınç-Karzan, Fatma
Nguyen, Ellie
Shen, Lingqing
author_facet Ho-Nguyen, Nam
Kılınç-Karzan, Fatma
Nguyen, Ellie
Shen, Lingqing
contents Online classification is a central problem in optimization, statistical learning and data science. Classical algorithms such as the perceptron offer efficient updates and finite mistake guarantees on linearly separable data, but they do not exploit the underlying geometric structure of the classification problem. We study the offline maximum margin problem through its dual formulation and use the resulting geometric insights to design a principled and efficient algorithm for the online setting. A key feature of our method is its translation invariance, inherited from the offline formulation, which plays a central role in its performance analysis. Our theoretical analysis yields improved mistake and margin bounds that depend only on translation-invariant quantities, offering stronger guarantees than existing algorithms under the same assumptions in favorable settings. In particular, we identify a parameter regime where our algorithm makes at most two mistakes per sequence, whereas the perceptron can be forced to make arbitrarily many mistakes. Our numerical study on real data further demonstrates that our method matches the computational efficiency of existing online algorithms, while significantly outperforming them in accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_19670
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates
Ho-Nguyen, Nam
Kılınç-Karzan, Fatma
Nguyen, Ellie
Shen, Lingqing
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
Online classification is a central problem in optimization, statistical learning and data science. Classical algorithms such as the perceptron offer efficient updates and finite mistake guarantees on linearly separable data, but they do not exploit the underlying geometric structure of the classification problem. We study the offline maximum margin problem through its dual formulation and use the resulting geometric insights to design a principled and efficient algorithm for the online setting. A key feature of our method is its translation invariance, inherited from the offline formulation, which plays a central role in its performance analysis. Our theoretical analysis yields improved mistake and margin bounds that depend only on translation-invariant quantities, offering stronger guarantees than existing algorithms under the same assumptions in favorable settings. In particular, we identify a parameter regime where our algorithm makes at most two mistakes per sequence, whereas the perceptron can be forced to make arbitrarily many mistakes. Our numerical study on real data further demonstrates that our method matches the computational efficiency of existing online algorithms, while significantly outperforming them in accuracy.
title Efficient Online Large-Margin Classification via Dual Certificates
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19670