When learning a new concept, not all training examples may prove equally useful for training: some may have higher or lower training value than others. The goal of this paper is to bring to the attention of the vision community the following considerations: (1) some examples are better than others for training detectors or classifiers, and (2) in the presence of better examples, some examples may negatively impact performance and removing them may be beneficial. In this paper, we propose an approach for measuring the training value of an example, and use it for ranking and greedily sorting examples. We test our methods on different vision tasks, models, datasets and classifiers. Our experiments show that the performance of current state-of-the-art detectors and classifiers can be improved when training on a subset, rather than the whole training set.
@cite_9: The support vector machine (SVM) has been widely applied for classification problems in both machine learning and statistics. Despite its popularity, however, SVM has some drawbacks in certain situations. In particular, the SVM classifier can be very sensitive to outliers in the training sample. Moreover, the number of support vectors (SVs) can be very large in many applications. To circumvent these drawbacks, we propose the robust truncated hinge loss SVM (RSVM), which uses a truncated hinge loss. The RSVM is shown to be more robust to outliers and to deliver more accurate classifiers using a smaller set of SVs than the standard SVM. Our theoretical results show that the RSVM is Fisher-consistent, even when there is no dominating class, a scenario that is particularly challenging for multicategory classification. Similar results are obtained for a class of margin-based classifiers.
@cite_7: In the interest of deriving classifiers that are robust to outlier observations, we present integer programming formulations of Vapnik's support vector machine (SVM) with the ramp loss and hard margin loss. The ramp loss allows a maximum error of 2 for each training observation, while the hard margin loss calculates error by counting the number of training observations that are in the margin or misclassified outside of the margin. SVM with these loss functions is shown to be a consistent estimator when used with certain kernel functions. In computational studies with simulated and real-world data, SVM with the robust loss functions ignores outlier observations effectively, providing an advantage over SVM with the traditional hinge loss when using the linear kernel. Despite the fact that training SVM with the robust loss functions requires the solution of a quadratic mixed-integer program (QMIP) and is NP-hard, while traditional SVM requires only the solution of a continuous quadratic program (QP), we are able to find good solutions and prove optimality for instances with up to 500 observations. Solution methods are presented for the new formulations that improve computational performance over industry-standard integer programming solvers alone.
@cite_20: 
Some methods for pruning training examples are designed to work with specific learning techniques. For boosting, Vezhnevets and Barinova @cite_20 proposed an algorithm that eliminates training examples that are not correctly classified during the training, considering them as confusing examples. They showed their approach to be effective for improving classification performance when the classes have a large degree of overlap. For SVMs, the loss function can be changed to become more robust to outliers and bad training examples @cite_9 @cite_7 .