Learning with progressive transductive Support Vector Machine

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a new learning method developed in recent years based on the foundations of statistical learning theory. By taking a transductive approach instead of an inductive one in support vector classifiers, the test set can be used as an additional source of information about margins. Intuitively, we would expect transductive learning to yield improvements when the training sets are small or when there is a significant deviation between the training and working set subsamples of the total population. In this paper, a progressive transductive support vector machine is addressed to extend Joachims' Transductive SVM to handle different class distributions. It solves the problem of having to estimate the ratio of positive/negative examples from the working set. The experimental results show that the algorithm is very promising.