Combining Multiple Features for Product Categorisation by Multiple Kernel Learning

E-commerce provides convenience and flexibility for consumers; for example, they can inquire about the availability of a desired product and get immediate response, hence they can seamlessly search for any desired products. Every day, e-commerce sites are updated with thousands of new images and their associated metadata (textual information), causing a problem of big data. Retail product categorisation involves cross-modal retrieval that shows the path of a category. In this study, we leveraged both image vectors of various aspects and textual metadata as features, then constructed a set of kernels. Multiple Kernel Learning (MKL) proposes to combine these kernels in order to achieve the best prediction accuracy. We compared the Support Vector Machine (SVM) prediction results between using an individual feature kernel and an MKL combined feature kernel to demonstrate the prediction improvement gained by MKL.