Fourier spectral analysis with Support Vector Machines

Question

I did some reading this afternoon about SVM's. And have the hope that this looks very promising.

I am currently working on a problem, where I'm looking for a pattern in the fourier spectrum. What I'm saying is, that I have been looking at spectrums for days. I hope to find some repeating patterns. I found some criterias that match a certain pattern, but with the next sample, the whole pattern could look slightly different. So there is always slight deviation, which makes it hard to describe. Or in another way, I might be overlooking something. But I can clearly say, which is the training data.

I was hoping to make use of SVM to train it, and predict the classification. Means that if I have another set of new data, that it would tell me, that it matches the training data or it goes into the "other" group, which could be anything (no need to know).

Is that something a SVM is able to do, or am I completly off? I couldn't find any good examples of input data to see if my problem is something I could feed to SVM.

Currently using Matlab.

Answer 1

I don't have experience with SVM, but I do have experience with related techniques, and here's what I can say:

In all likelihood, you can't simply go from a spectrum to SVM to decision. You need to determine what it is about the spectrums that distinguish your various inputs. For example, if it's the way the data changes over time or the relationship between the high and low frequencies that makes the inputs different, you need to encode that a single parameter. Eg, you could make a parameter that's the ratio of some of your higher frequencies to some of your lower frequencies. You may also want to use parameters like frequency centroid and zero-crossing rate, which are simpler than the spectrum, but may still carry useful information (These are used in audio and speech. not sure if they apply to whatever you are looking at). Once you have these derived parameters, feed them to the SVM analysis, which will do the sorting.

Other techniques you might want to examine (which also have the same requirements) include HMM (Hidden Markov Models), K-Means, and Logistic Regression.

Answer 2

There actually has been tons of research done on this particular topic, but especially with Wavelet Transform. Google Wavelet Transform and SVM and you will find a number of papers. From there, you can easily go ahead with adjusting your model from Wavelet to FFT spectrum.