Java: Data Science Made Easy

Support vector machines

A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised machine learning algorithm used for both classification and regression problems. It is mostly used for classification problems. The approach creates a hyperplane to categorize the training data. A hyperplane can be envisioned as a geometric plane that separates two regions. In a two-dimensional space, it will be a line. In a three-dimensional space, it will be a two-dimensional plane. For higher dimensions, it is harder to conceptualize, but they do exist.

Consider the following figure depicting a distribution of two types of data points. The lines represent possible hyperplanes that separate these points. Part of the SVM process is to find the best hyperplane for the ...