Training a Support Vector Machine (SVM) requires the solution of a very large quadratic programming (QP) problem. This paper proposes an algorithm for training SVMs: Sequential Minimal Optimization, or SMO. SMO breaks the large QP problem into a series of smallest possible QP problems which are analytically solvable. Thus, SMO does not require a numerical QP library. SMO's computation time is dominated by evaluation of the kernel, hence kernel optimizations substantially quicken
John C. Platt