Scaling up support vector machines using nearest neighbor condensation

In this brief, we describe the FCNN-SVM classifier, which combines the support vector machine (SVM) approach and the fast nearest neighbor condensation classification rule (FCNN) in order to make SVMs practical on large collections of data. As a main contribution, it is experimentally shown that, on very large and multidimensional data sets, the FCNN-SVM is one or two orders of magnitude faster than SVM, and that the number of support vectors (SVs) is more than halved with respect to SVM. Thus, a drastic reduction of both training and testing time is achieved by using the FCNN-SVM. This result is obtained at the expense of a little loss of accuracy. The FCNN-SVM is proposed as a viable alternative to the standard SVM in applications where a fast response time is a fundamental requirement.