SVM and graphical algorithms: a cooperative approach

We present a cooperative approach using both support vector machine (SVM) algorithms and visualization methods. SVM are widely used today and often give high quality results, but they are used as "black-box" (it is very difficult to explain the obtained results) and cannot treat easily very large datasets. We have developed graphical methods to help the user to evaluate and explain the SVM results. The first method is a graphical representation of the separating frontier quality, it is then linked with other visualization tools to help the user explaining SVM results. The information provided by these graphical methods is also used for SVM parameter tuning, they are then used together with automatic algorithms to deal with very large datasets on standard computers. We present an evaluation of our approach with the UCI and the Kent Ridge Bio-medical data sets.