Reducing the effect of out-voting problem in ensemble based incremental support vector machines

Although Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have been successfully applied to solve a large number of classification and regression problems, they suffer from the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. In our previous work, integrating the SVM classifiers into an ensemble framework using Learn++ (SVMLearn++) [1], we have shown that the SVM classifiers can in fact be equipped with the incremental learning capability. However, Learn++ suffers from an inherent out-voting problem: when asked to learn new classes, an unnecessarily large number of classifiers are generated to learn the new classes. In this paper, we propose a new ensemble based incremental learning approach using SVMs that is based on the incremental Learn++.MT algorithm. Experiments on the real-world and benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach can reduce the number of SVM classifiers generated, thus reduces the effect of out-voting problem. It also provides performance improvements over previous approach.