  Motivated by the challenge of using DNA-seq data to identify viruses in human
blood samples, we propose a novel classification algorithm called "Radial
Distance Weighted Discrimination" (or Radial DWD). This classifier is designed
for binary classification, assuming one class is surrounded by the other class
in very diverse radial directions, which is seen to be typical for our virus
detection data. This separation of the 2 classes in multiple radial directions
naturally motivates the development of Radial DWD. While classical machine
learning methods such as the Support Vector Machine and linear Distance
Weighted Discrimination can sometimes give reasonable answers for a given data
set, their generalizability is severely compromised because of the linear
separating boundary. Radial DWD addresses this challenge by using a more
appropriate (in this particular case) spherical separating boundary.
Simulations show that for appropriate radial contexts, this gives much better
generalizability than linear methods, and also much better than conventional
kernel based (nonlinear) Support Vector Machines, because the latter methods
essentially use much of the information in the data for determining the shape
of the separating boundary. The effectiveness of Radial DWD is demonstrated for
real virus detection.
