In the past several years, support vector machines (SVM) have achieved a huge success in many fields, especially in pattern recognition. But the standard SVM cannot deal with length-variable vectors, which is one severe obstacle for its applications to some important areas, such as speech recognition and part-of-speech tagging. The paper proposed a novel SVM with discriminative dynamic time alignment (DDTA-SVM) to solve this problem. When training DDTA-SVM classifier, according to the category information of the training samples, different time alignment strategies were adopted to manipulate them in the kernel functions, which contributed to great improvement for training speed and generalization capability of the classifier. Since the alignment operator was embedded in kernel functions, the training algorithms of standard SVM were still compatible in DDTA-SVM. In order to increase the reliability of the classification, a new classification algorithm was suggested. The preliminary experimental results on Chinese confusable syllables speech classification task show that DDTA-SVM obtains faster convergence speed and better classification performance than dynamic time alignment kernel SVM (DTAK-SVM). Moreover, DDTA-SVM also gives higher classification precision compared to the conventional HMM. This proves that the proposed method is effective, especially for confusable length-variable pattern classification tasks.
