An efficient algorithm for computing the HHSVM and its generalizations

The hybrid Huberized support vector machine (HHSVM) has proved its advantages over the ℓ₁ support vector machine (SVM) in terms of classification and variable selection. Similar to the ℓ₁ SVM, the HHSVM enjoys a piecewise linear path property and can be computed by a least-angle regression (LARS)-type piecewise linear solution path algorithm. In this article, we propose a generalized coordinate descent (GCD) algorithm for computing the solution path of the HHSVM. The GCD algorithm takes advantage of a majorization-minimization trick to make each coordinatewise update simple and efficient. Extensive numerical experiments show that the GCD algorithm is much faster than the LARS-type path algorithm. We further extend the GCD algorithm to solve a class of elastic net penalized large margin classifiers, demonstrating the generality of the GCD algorithm. We have implemented the GCD algorithm in a publicly available R package gcdnet.