Mastering pandas - Second Edition

Support vector machine

A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a powerful supervised learning algorithm used for classification and regression. It is a discriminative classifier—it draws a boundary between clusters or classifications of data, so new points can be classified based on the cluster that they fall into.

SVMs do not just find a boundary line; they also try to determine margins for the boundary on either side. The SVM algorithm tries to find the boundary with the largest possible margin around it.

Support vectors are points that define the largest margin around the boundary—remove these points, and possibly, a larger margin can be found. Hence the name, support, as they support the margin around the boundary line. The support vectors ...