Why is scikit-learn SVM classifier cross validation so slow?

Question

I am trying to compare multiple classifiers on a dataset that I have. To get accurate accuracy scores for the classifiers I am now performing 10 fold cross validation for each classifier. This goes well for all of them except SVM (both linear and rbf kernels). The data is loaded like this:

dataset = pd.read_csv("data/distance_annotated_indels.txt", delimiter="\t", header=None)

X = dataset.iloc[:, [5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26]].values
y = dataset.iloc[:, 4].values

from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(X, y, test_size = 0.2)

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
sc = StandardScaler()
X_train = sc.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test = sc.transform(X_test)

Cross validation for for example a Random Forest works fine:

start = time.time()
classifier = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators = 100, criterion = 'entropy')
classifier.fit(X_train, y_train)
y_pred = classifier.predict(X_test)
cv = ShuffleSplit(n_splits=10, test_size=0.2)
scores = cross_val_score(classifier, X, y, cv=10)
print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred))
print("Random Forest accuracy after 10 fold CV: %0.2f (+/- %0.2f)" % (scores.mean(), scores.std() * 2) + ", " + str(round(time.time() - start, 3)) + "s")

Output:

             precision    recall  f1-score   support

          0       0.97      0.95      0.96      3427
          1       0.95      0.97      0.96      3417

avg / total       0.96      0.96      0.96      6844

Random Forest accuracy after 10 fold CV: 0.92 (+/- 0.06), 90.842s

However for SVM this process takes ages (waited for 2 hours, still nothing). The sklearn website does not make me any wiser. Is there something I should be doing different for SVM classifiers? The SVM code is as follows:

start = time.time()
classifier = SVC(kernel = 'linear')
classifier.fit(X_train, y_train)
y_pred = classifier.predict(X_test)
scores = cross_val_score(classifier, X, y, cv=10)
print(classification_report(y_test, y_pred))
print("Linear SVM accuracy after 10 fold CV: %0.2f (+/- %0.2f)" % (scores.mean(), scores.std() * 2) + ", " + str(round(time.time() - start, 3)) + "s")

Also, first standardize your data.. SVMs work well with standardized data. — Vivek Kumar

Davide Fiocco Davide Fiocco · Accepted Answer · 2018-05-07T19:37:04

If you have a lot of samples the computational complexity of the problem gets in the way, see Training complexity of Linear SVM.

Consider playing with the verbose flag of cross_val_score to see more logs about progress. Also, with n_jobs set to a value > 1 (or even using all CPUs with n_jobs set to -1, if memory allows) you could speed up computation via parallelization. http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.model_selection.cross_val_score.html can be useful to evaluate these options.

If performance is poor I'd consider reducing the value of cv (see https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/27730/choice-of-k-in-k-fold-cross-validation for a discussion on this)

Why is scikit-learn SVM classifier cross validation so slow?

2 Answers