Python: Real-World Data Science

Solving nonlinear problems using a kernel SVM

Another reason why SVMs enjoy high popularity among machine learning practitioners is that they can be easily kernelized to solve nonlinear classification problems. Before we discuss the main concept behind kernel SVM, let's first define and create a sample dataset to see how such a nonlinear classification problem may look.

Using the following code, we will create a simple dataset that has the form of an XOR gate using the logical_xor function from NumPy, where 100 samples will be assigned the class label 1 and 100 samples will be assigned the class label -1, respectively:

>>> np.random.seed(0) >>> X_xor = np.random.randn(200, 2) >>> y_xor = np.logical_xor(X_xor[:, 0] > 0, X_xor[:, 1] > 0) >>> y_xor ...