Papers › Don't Rule Out Simple Models Prematurely: A Large Scale Benchmark Comparing Linear and...
Don't Rule Out Simple Models Prematurely: A Large Scale Benchmark Comparing Linear and Non-linear Classifiers in OpenML
Benjamin Strang, Peter van der Putten, Jan N. van Rijn, Frank Hutter
A basic step for each data-mining or machine learning task is to determine which model to choose based on the problem and the data at hand. In this paper we investigate when non-linear classifiers outperform linear classifiers by means of a large scale experiment. We benchmark linear and non-linear versions of three types of classifiers (support vector machines; neural networks; and decision trees), and analyze the results to determine on what type of datasets the non-linear version performs better. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first principled and large scale attempt to support the common assumption that non-linear classifiers excel only when large amounts of data are available.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections