Training Pairwise Support Vector Machines with large scale datasets

We recently presented an efficient approach for training a Pairwise Support Vector Machine (PSVM) with a suitable kernel for a quite large speaker recognition task. The PSVM approach, rather than estimating an SVM model per class according to the “one versus all” discriminative paradigm, classifies pairs of examples as belonging or not to the same class. Training a PSVM with large amount of data, however, is a memory and computational expensive task, because the number of training pairs grows quadratically with the number of training patterns. This paper proposes an approach that allows discarding the training pairs that do not essentially contribute to the set of Support Vectors (SVs) of the training set. This selection of training pairs is feasible because we show that the number of SVs does not grow quadratically, with the number of pairs, but only linearly with the number of speakers in the training set. Our approach dramatically reduces the memory and computational complexity of PSVM training, making possible the use of large datasets, including many speakers. It has been assessed on the extended core conditions of the 2012 Speaker Recognition Evaluation. The results show that the accuracy of the trained PSVMs increases with the training set size, and that the C_primary of a PSVM trained with a small subset of the i-vectors pairs is 10-30% better than the one obtained by a generative model trained on the complete set of i-vectors.