Error Rates for Kernel Classification under Source and Capacity Conditions

We consider the problem of kernel classification. Works on kernel regression have shown that the rate of decay of the prediction error with the number of samples for a large class of data-sets is well characterized by two quantities: the capacity and source of the data-set. In this work, we compute the decay rates for the misclassification (prediction) error under the Gaussian design, for data-sets satisfying source and capacity assumptions. We derive the rates as a function of the source and capacity coefficients for two standard kernel classification settings, namely margin-maximizing Support Vector Machines (SVM) and ridge classification, and contrast the two methods. As a consequence, we find that the known worst-case rates are loose for this class of data-sets. Finally, we show that the rates presented in this work are also observed on real data-sets.