Online Learning by Ellipsoid Method

Abstract

In this work, we extend the ellipsoid method, which was originally designed for convex optimization, for online learning. The key idea is to approximate by an ellipsoid the classification hypotheses that are consistent with all the training examples received so far. This is in contrast to most online learning algorithms where only a single classifier is maintained at each iteration. Efficient algorithms are presented for updating both the centroid and the positive definite matrix of ellipsoid given a misclassified example. In addition to the classical ellipsoid method, an improved version for online learning is also presented. Mistake bounds for both ellipsoid methods are derived. Evaluation with the USPS dataset and three UCI data-sets shows encouraging results when comparing the proposed online learning algorithm to two state-of-the-art online learners.