Parallelizing Support Vector Machines on Distributed Computers

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) suffer from a widely recognized scalability problem in both memory use and computational time. To improve scalability, we have developed a parallel SVM algorithm (PSVM), which reduces memory use through performing a row-based, approximate matrix factorization, and which loads only essential data to each machine to perform parallel computation. Let $n$ denote the number of training instances, $p$ the reduced matrix dimension after factorization ($p$ is significantly smaller than $n$), and $m$ the number of machines. PSVM reduces the memory requirement from $\MO$($n^2$) to $\MO$($np/m$), and improves computation time to $\MO$($np^2/m$). Empirical studies on up to $500$ computers shows PSVM to be effective.

Authors

• Kaihua Zhu
• Hao Wang
• Hongjie Bai
• Jian Li Tencent Hunyuan
• Zhihuan Qiu
• Hang Cui University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Edward Chang

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.