A deep quasi-linear kernel composition method for support vector machines

In this paper, we introduce a data-dependent kernel called deep quasi-linear kernel, which can directly gain a profit from a pre-trained feedforward deep network. Firstly, a multi-layer gated bilinear classifier is formulated to mimic the functionality of a feed-forward neural network. The only difference between them is that the activation values of hidden units in the multi-layer gated bilinear classifier are dependent on a pre-trained neural network rather than a pre-defined activation function. Secondly, we demonstrate the equivalence between the multi-layer gated bilinear classifier and an SVM with a deep quasi-linear kernel. By deriving a kernel composition function, traditional optimization algorithms for a kernel SVM can be directly implemented to implicitly optimize the parameters of the multi-layer gated bilinear classifier. Experimental results on different data sets show that our proposed classifier obtains an ability to outperform both an SVM with a RBF kernel and the pre-trained feedforward deep network.