Feature selection in linear SVMs via hard cardinality constraint: a scalable SDP decomposition approach

In this paper, we study the embedded feature selection problem in linear Support Vector Machines (SVMs), in which a cardinality constraint is employed, leading to a fully explainable selection model. The problem is NP-hard due to the presence of the cardinality constraint, even though the original linear SVM amounts to a problem solvable in polynomial time. To handle the hard problem, we first introduce two mixed-integer formulations for which novel SDP relaxations are proposed. Exploiting the sparsity pattern of the relaxations, we decompose the problems and obtain equivalent relaxations in a much smaller cone, making the conic approaches scalable. To make the best usage of the decomposed relaxations, we propose heuristics using the information of its optimal solution. Moreover, an exact procedure is proposed by solving a sequence of mixed-integer decomposed SDPs. Numerical results on classical benchmarking datasets are reported, showing the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.

Margin Optimal Classification Trees

In recent years there has been growing attention to interpretable machine learning models which can give explanatory insights on their behavior. Thanks to their interpretability, decision trees have been intensively studied for classification tasks, and due to the remarkable advances in mixed-integer programming (MIP), various approaches have been proposed to formulate the problem of training an Optimal Classification Tree (OCT) as a MIP model. We present a novel mixed-integer quadratic formulation for the OCT problem, which exploits the generalization capabilities of Support Vector Machines for binary classification. Our model, denoted as Margin Optimal Classification Tree (MARGOT), encompasses the use of maximum margin multivariate hyperplanes nested in a binary tree structure. To enhance the interpretability of our approach, we analyse two alternative versions of MARGOT, which include feature selection constraints inducing local sparsity of the hyperplanes. First, MARGOT has been tested on non-linearly separable synthetic datasets in 2-dimensional feature space to provide a graphical representation of the maximum margin approach. Finally, the proposed models have been tested on benchmark datasets from the UCI repository. The MARGOT formulation turns out to be easier to solve than other OCT approaches, and the generated tree better generalizes on new observations. The two interpretable versions are effective in selecting the most relevant features and maintaining good prediction quality.