Prediction of periventricular leukomalacia occurrence in neonates using a novel support vector machine classifier optimization method

Prior work has documented that Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers can be powerful tools in predicting clinical outcomes of complex diseases such as Periventricular Leukomalacia (PVL). Our previous study showed that SVM performance can be improved significantly by optimizing the supervised training set used during the learning stage of the overall SVM algorithm. This study fully develops the initial idea using the reliable Leave-One-Out Cross-validation (LOOCV) technique. The work presented in this paper confirms previous results and improves the performance of the SVM even further. In addition, using the LOOCV technique, the computational time is decreased and the structure of the algorithm simplified, making this framework more feasible. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of the resulting optimized SVM classifier on an unseen set of data. This demonstrates that the developed SVM algorithm outperforms normal SVM type classifiers without any loss of generalization.