Machine learning, best technique

Question

I am new to machine learning. I am familiar with SVM , Neural networks and GA. I'd like to know the best technique to learn for classifying pictures and audio. SVM does a decent job but takes a lot of time. Anyone know a faster and better one? Also I'd like to know the fastest library for SVM.

Answer 1

Your question is a good one, and has to do with the state of the art of classification algorithms, as you say, the election of the classifier depends on your data, in the case of images, I can tell you that there is one method called Ada-Boost, read this and this to know more about it, in the other hand, you can find lots of people are doing some researh, for example in Gender Classification of Faces Using Adaboost [Rodrigo Verschae,Javier Ruiz-del-Solar and Mauricio Correa] they say:

"Adaboost-mLBP outperforms all other Adaboost-based methods, as well as baseline methods (SVM, PCA and PCA+SVM)" Take a look at it.

Answer 2

If your main concern is speed, you should probably take a look at VW and generally at stochastic gradient descent based algorithms for training SVMs.