Journal of Data Science

Multiclass probability estimation is the problem of estimating conditional probabilities of a data point belonging to a class given its covariate information. It has broad applications in statistical analysis and data science. Recently a class of weighted Support Vector Machines (wSVMs) has been developed to estimate class probabilities through ensemble learning for K-class problems (Wu et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2019), where K is the number of classes. The estimators are robust and achieve high accuracy for probability estimation, but their learning is implemented through pairwise coupling, which demands polynomial time in K. In this paper, we propose two new learning schemes, the baseline learning and the One-vs-All (OVA) learning, to further improve wSVMs in terms of computational efficiency and estimation accuracy. In particular, the baseline learning has optimal computational complexity in the sense that it is linear in K. Though not the most efficient in computation, the OVA is found to have the best estimation accuracy among all the procedures under comparison. The resulting estimators are distribution-free and shown to be consistent. We further conduct extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate their finite sample performance.

Multi-classification is commonly encountered in data science practice, and it has broad applications in many areas such as biology, medicine, and engineering. Variable selection in multiclass problems is much more challenging than in binary classification or regression problems. In addition to estimating multiple discriminant functions for separating different classes, we need to decide which variables are important for each individual discriminant function as well as for the whole set of functions. In this paper, we address the multi-classification variable selection problem by proposing a new form of penalty, supSCAD, which first groups all the coefficients of the same variable associated with all the discriminant functions altogether and then imposes the SCAD penalty on the supnorm of each group. We apply the new penalty to both soft and hard classification and develop two new procedures: the supSCAD multinomial logistic regression and the supSCAD multi-category support vector machine. Our theoretical results show that, with a proper choice of the tuning parameter, the supSCAD multinomial logistic regression can identify the underlying sparse model consistently and enjoys oracle properties even when the dimension of predictors goes to infinity. Based on the local linear and quadratic approximation to the non-concave SCAD and nonlinear multinomial log-likelihood function, we show that the new procedures can be implemented efficiently by solving a series of linear or quadratic programming problems. Performance of the new methods is illustrated by simulation studies and real data analysis of the Small Round Blue Cell Tumors and the Semeion Handwritten Digit data sets.