Multi-class second-order cone programming support vector machines

•Novel multiclass approach that simultaneously constructs all required hyperplanes.•Extensions of OvO and OvA multiclass SVM to second-order cone programming SVM.•Best classification performance is achieved in experiments on benchmark datasets.

This paper presents novel second-order cone programming (SOCP) formulations that determine a linear multi-class predictor using support vector machines (SVMs). We first extend the ideas of OvO (One-versus-One) and OvA (One-versus-All) SVM formulations to SOCP-SVM, providing two interesting alternatives to the standard SVM formulations. Additionally, we propose a novel approach (MC-SOCP) that simultaneously constructs all required hyperplanes for multi-class classification, based on the multi-class SVM formulation (MC-SVM). The use of conic constraints for each pair of training patterns in a single optimization problem provides an adequate framework for a balanced and effective prediction.