Budget Online Multiple Kernel Learning

Abstract: Online learning with multiple kernels has gained increasing interests in recent years and found many applications. For classification tasks, Online Multiple Kernel Classification (OMKC), which learns a kernel based classifier by seeking the optimal linear combination of a pool of single kernel classifiers in an online fashion, achieves superior accuracy and enjoys great flexibility compared with traditional single-kernel classifiers. Despite being studied extensively, existing OMKC algorithms suffer from high computational cost due to their unbounded numbers of support vectors. To overcome this drawback, we present a novel framework of Budget Online Multiple Kernel Learning (BOMKL) and propose a new Sparse Passive Aggressive learning to perform effective budget online learning. Specifically, we adopt a simple yet effective Bernoulli sampling to decide if an incoming instance should be added to the current set of support vectors. By limiting the number of support vectors, our method can significantly accelerate OMKC while maintaining satisfactory accuracy that is comparable to that of the existing OMKC algorithms. We theoretically prove that our new method achieves an optimal regret bound in expectation, and empirically found that the proposed algorithm outperforms various OMKC algorithms and can easily scale up to large-scale datasets.