Multiclass Support Vector Machines Using Balanced Dichotomization

The Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been introduced as a technique for solving a variety of learning and function estimation problems. The technique was originally designed for binary classification learning with its outstanding performance. However, many real world applications involve multiclass classification. Typical SVM solutions to N-class problems are to construct and combine several two-class classifiers into an N-class classifier such as the one-against-the-rest approach (1-v-r) and the one-against-one approach (1- v-1). The one-against-one methods solve N(N?1)/2 binary classifiers where each one is trained on data from two classes.