Comment by ghm2180
12 hours ago
Yes, SVMs and Random Forests still rule the many worlds of classification problems often not in the spotlight.
12 hours ago
Yes, SVMs and Random Forests still rule the many worlds of classification problems often not in the spotlight.
Support Vector Machines involve solving a large QP optimization problem... which is often done by running a variant of gradient descent (or one of the second- or quasi-second-order optimization algorithms, which involves finding the Hessian as well as the gradient)
I was under the impression that solving QP optimization problems (subject to constraints) was largely performed by SMO.
Back when I was a researcher, I had a classification problem where the default random forest classifier built into scikitlearn completely dominated the neural method. The best numbers we got were something like a ~30% improvement from baseline for the neural network to ~95% for the random forest.
The disparity was so large that I was certain I must have made a mistake and I spent a few hours debugging, and then a few hours more trying different neural architectures.
Turns out this is just a super common experience for anyone in NNs who would also try the more established learning algorithms.