Cycle-breaking acceleration for support vector regression

Support vector regression (SVR) is a powerful tool in modeling and prediction tasks with widespread application in many areas. The most representative algorithms to train SVR models are Shevade et al.'s Modification 2 and Lin's WSS1 and WSS2 methods in the LIBSVM library. Both are variants of standard SMO in which the updating pairs selected are those that most violate the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions, to which LIBSVM adds a heuristic to improve the decrease in the objective function. In this paper, and after presenting a simple derivation of the updating procedure based on a greedy maximization of the gain in the objective function, we show how cycle-breaking techniques that accelerate the convergence of support vector machines (SVM) in classification can also be applied under this framework, resulting in significantly improved training times for SVR.