Robust statistics-based support vector machine and its variants: a survey

Abstract

Support vector machines (SVMs) are versatile learning models which are used for both classification and regression. Several authors have reported successful applications of SVM in a wide range of fields. With the continuous growth and development in machine learning using SVM, it was observed that SVM also has some limitations. This paper focuses on limitation regarding its boundary, i.e., sensitivity to noise or outliers in the dataset. Researchers have proposed many variants and extensions of SVM to make it robust. This paper gives an overview of the developments in the field of robust statistics in support vector machines and its variants. This paper includes an up to date survey of the research development in the field of robustness in SVM and its extensions. It also includes a discussion part which not only discusses the pros and cons of the proposed approaches but also highlights some important future directions in it. This paper would be helpful for researchers working in the field of robust statistics as well as supervised machine learning. This study would also encourage the researchers to work further in the development of SVM and even its variants to improve them. © 2019, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.