METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES

A method and apparatus is described for improving the efficiency of any machine that uses an algorithm that maps to a higher dimensional space in which a given set of vectors is used in a test phase. In particular, reduced set vectors are used. These reduced set vectors are different from the vectors in the set and are determined pursuant to an optimization approach other than the eigenvalue computation used for homogeneous quadratic kernels. An illustrative embodiment is described in the context of a support vector machine (SVM).