9. The storage medium as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the storage medium stores further instructions executable to implement an inference method including the operations of: invoking the sum-of-exponentials function optimization method respective to a sum-of-exponentials function constrained by discrete observations y defining categorization observation conditioned by continuous variables x representing at least one input object where y=(y 1 , . . . , y n )ε{1, . . . , K} n and x=(x 1 , . . . , x n )ε n×d ; and applying the optimized sum-of-exponentials function output by the invocation of the sum-of-exponentials function optimization method to the continuous variables x representing at least one input object to generate classification probabilities.
9. The storage medium as set forth in claim 1 , wherein the storage medium stores further instructions executable to implement an inference method including the operations of: invoking the sum-of-exponentials function optimization method respective to a sum-of-exponentials function constrained by discrete observations y defining categorization observation conditioned by continuous variables x representing at least one input object where y=(y 1 , . . . , y n )ε{1, . . . , K} n and x=(x 1 , . . . , x n )ε n×d ; and applying the optimized sum-of-exponentials function output by the invocation of the sum-of-exponentials function optimization method to the continuous variables x representing at least one input object to generate classification probabilities. 10. The storage medium as set forth in claim 9 , wherein the continuous variables x represent at least one input text-based document in a bag-of-words representation.