Mixed-integer quadratic optimization and iterative clustering techniques for semi-supervised support vector machines

Among the most famous algorithms for solving classification problems are support vector machines (SVMs), which find a separating hyperplane for a set of labeled data points. In some applications, however, labels are only available for a subset of points. Furthermore, this subset can be non-representative, e.g., due to self-selection in a survey. Semi-supervised SVMs tackle the setting of labeled and unlabeled data and can often improve the reliability of the results. Moreover, additional information about the size of the classes can be available from undisclosed sources. We propose a mixed-integer quadratic optimization (MIQP) model that covers the setting of labeled and unlabeled data points as well as the overall number of points in each class. Since the MIQP’s solution time rapidly grows as the number of variables increases, we introduce an iterative clustering approach to reduce the model’s size. Moreover, we present an update rule for the required big-M values, prove the correctness of the iterative clustering method as well as derive tailored dimension-reduction and warm-starting techniques. Our numerical results show that our approach leads to a similar accuracy and precision than the MIQP formulation but at much lower computational cost. Thus, we can solve larger problems. With respect to the original SVM formulation, we observe that our approach has even better accuracy and precision for biased samples.