Support Vector Machines: Induction Principle, Adaptive Tuning and Prior Knowledge

This thesis presents a theoretical and practical study of Support Vector Machines (SVM) and related learning algorithms. In a first part, we introduce a new induction principle from which SVMs can be derived, but some new algorithms are also presented in this framework. In a second part, after studying how to estimate the generalization error of an SVM, we suggest to choose the kernel parameters of an SVM by minimizing this estimate. Several applications such as feature selection are presented. Finally the third part deals with the incoporation of prior knowledge in a learning algorithm and more specifically, we studied the case of known invariant transormations and the use of unlabeled data