Accurate performance estimators for information retrieval based on span bound of support vector machines

Support vector machines have met with significant success in the information retrieval field, especially in handling text classification tasks. Although various performance estimators for SVMs have been proposed, these only focus on accuracy which is based on the leave-one-out cross validation procedure. Information-retrieval-related performance measures are always neglected in a kernel learning methodology. In this paper, we have proposed a set of information-retrieval-oriented performance estimators for SVMs, which are based on the span bound of the leave-one-out procedure. Experiments have proven that our proposed estimators are both effective and stable.