Analyzing and Securing Social Networks

44 Analyzing and Securing Social Networks

The functional margin, or the margin for short, is dened geometrically as the Euclidean distance

of the closest point from the decision boundary to the input space. Figure 4.7 gives an intuitive

explanation of why margin maximization gives the best solution of separation. In Figure 4.7a, we

can nd an innite number of separators for a specic data set. There is no specic or clear reason

to favor one separator over another. In Figure 4.7b, we see that maximizing the margin provides

only one thick separator. Such a solution proves to achieve the best generalization accuracy, that is,

prediction for the ...