Asymmetric-margin support vector machines for lung tissue classification

This paper concerns lung tissue classification using asymmetric-margin support vector machine (ASVM) to handle the imbalance of the positive and negative classes in a one-against-all multiclass classification problem. The hyperparameters of the algorithm are obtained using an optimization of the upper bound of the leave-one-out error of the ASVM. The ASVM is applied on the dataset with its original distribution and oversampled so that the ratio of the examples is equal to the prevalence of patients having the tissue in the database. The two versions of the ASVM models were compared with a model build with a conventional SVM. The ASVM improved the results obtained with a conventional SVM. The incorporation of prior knowledge concerning the prevalence of the patients improved the results obtained with ASVM.