English

Sequential Minimal Optimization for $\varepsilon$-SVR with MAPE Loss and Sample-Dependent Box Constraints

Numerical Analysis 2026-05-11 v2 Numerical Analysis Machine Learning

Abstract

We derive a Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm for the quadratic dual problem arising from ε\varepsilon-SVR~\cite{Vapnik1995, Drucker1997, Smola2004} modified to minimize the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE)~\cite{Makridakis1993, Hyndman2006} directly in the loss function~\cite{benavides2025support}. This formulation is part of a broader family of SVR models with percentage-error losses that also includes least-squares variants~\cite{Suykens2002} and symmetric-kernel extensions~\cite{Espinoza2005}, whose unified structure is studied in~\cite{benavides2026unified}. The key structural difference from standard ε\varepsilon-SVR is that the box constraints become \emph{sample-dependent}: αk,αk[0,100C/yk]\alpha_k, \alpha_k^* \in [0,\, 100C/y_k]. We show that this modification affects only (i) the feasibility sets \Iup\Iup and \Idown\Idown in the working-set selection and (ii) the clipping bounds in the analytic two-variable update, while leaving the curvature formula and gradient update structurally identical to the standard SMO~\cite{Platt1998, Platt1999, Fan2005}. A shrinking heuristic adapted to the sample-dependent bounds is derived and shown to introduce an asymmetry between α\alpha- and α\alpha^*-variables controlled by the gap 2ykε/1002y_k\varepsilon/100. The same solver applies to the symmetric-kernel variant (m2) by replacing Ω\Omega with Ωs=12(Ω+aΩ)\Omega_s = \tfrac{1}{2}(\Omega + a\Omega^*)~\cite{Espinoza2005}. Numerical validation against an interior-point QP reference solver confirms solution agreement to within solver termination tolerance across ten synthetic configurations spanning both kernel variants and symmetry types. An implementation is available in the open-source \texttt{psvr} R package~\cite{BenavidesHerrera2026Rpsvr}.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.01446,
  title  = {Sequential Minimal Optimization for $\varepsilon$-SVR with MAPE Loss and Sample-Dependent Box Constraints},
  author = {Pablo Benavides-Herrera and Riemann Ruiz-Cruz and Juan Diego Sánchez-Torres},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01446},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 1 figure, 3 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:46:42.706Z