Dropout Training for Support Vector Machines

Dropout and other feature noising schemes have shown promising results in controlling over-fitting by artificially corrupting the training data. Though extensive theoretical and empirical studies have been performed for generalized linear models, little work has been done for support vector machines (SVMs), one of the most successful approaches for supervised learning. This paper presents dropout training for linear SVMs. To deal with the intractable expectation of the nonsmooth hinge loss under corrupting distributions, we develop an iteratively re-weighted least square (IRLS) algorithm by exploring data augmentation techniques. Our algorithm iteratively minimizes the expectation of a reweighted least square problem, where the re-weights have closedform solutions. The similar ideas are applied to develop a new IRLS algorithm for the expected logistic loss under corrupting distributions. Our algorithms offer insights on the connection and difference between the hinge loss and logistic loss in dropout training. Empirical results on several real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of dropout training on significantly boosting the classification accuracy of linear SVMs.