[tahw]

How could this possibly be faster than a linear classifier? In "Implementation" near Section 2 they claim that their implementation is better than a linear classifier but that seems like it couldn't possibly be true could it? A single floating point operation per parameter has gotta be faster than multiple branches, right?

[jononor]

A linear classifier can only handle linearly separable things, which limits prediction accuracy a lot. I don't think you'll get anywhere close to this level of classification with a linear model. In the experiments it is shown to outperform SVM RBF.

The platforms in question doesn't have hardware for floating point, any floating point support needs to be emulated in software (slow).