A geometrical method to improve performance of the support vector machine.

The performance of a support vector machine (SVM) largely depends on the kernel function used. This letter investigates a geometrical method to optimize the kernel function. The method is a modification of the one proposed by S. Amari and S. Wu. Its concern is the use of the prior knowledge obtained in a primary step training to conformally rescale the kernel function, so that the separation between the two classes of data is enlarged. The result is that the new algorithm works efficiently and overcomes the susceptibility of the original method.