In this paper we propose a novel, scalable, clustering based Ordinal Regression formulation, which is an instance of a Second Order Cone Program (SOCP) with one Second Order Cone (SOC) constraint. The main contribution of the paper is a fast algorithm, CB-OR, which solves the proposed formulation more eficiently than general purpose solvers. Another main contribution of the paper is to pose the problem of focused crawling as a large scale Ordinal Regression problem and solve using the proposed CB-OR. Focused crawling is an efficient mechanism for discovering resources of interest on the web. Posing the problem of focused crawling as an Ordinal Regression problem avoids the need for a negative class and topic hierarchy, which are the main drawbacks of the existing focused crawling methods. Experiments on large synthetic and benchmark datasets show the scalability of CB-OR. Experiments also show that the proposed focused crawler outperforms the state-of-the-art.

In this paper we propose a novel family of kernels for multivariate time-series classification problems. Each time-series is approximated by a linear combination of piecewise polynomial functions in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space by a novel kernel interpolation technique. Using the associated kernel function a large margin classification formulation is proposed which can discriminate between two classes. The formulation leads to kernels, between two multivariate time-series, which can be efficiently computed. The kernels have been successfully applied to writer independent handwritten character recognition.