A distributed ensemble of relevance vector machines for large-scale data sets on Spark

The relevance vector machine (RVM) is a machine learning algorithm based on sparse Bayesian theory that shows good classification performance for small-scale data sets. However, due to the high runtime complexity \(O\left( n^{3}\right) \) and space complexity \(O\left( n^{2}\right) \) of the RVM, it is difficult to train models for medium-sized or large-scale data sets. Therefore, a distributed ensemble of relevance vector machines on the Spark framework (DE-RVM) is proposed. In this approach, a data set is divided into a number of disjoint subsets of data, and on each subset, a set of RVM classifiers are trained using the AdaBoostRVM based on sample type (STAB-RVM) according to the concept of ensemble learning. A final classifier is generated by the combination method with a diversity measure for the RVM classifiers. The smallest empirical loss of the combinatorial classifier is obtained in the quadratic programming problem. The algorithm was applied to both artificial data sets and real data sets. The experimental results show that the proposed method offers good classification performance and can effectively improve the ability of the RVM to process large-scale data sets.