R: Mining Spatial, Text, Web, and Social Media Data

Document retrieval and Support Vector Machine

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a classification algorithm applicable to both linear and nonlinear data classification. It is based on an assumption: if two classes of data cannot be divided by a hyper-plane, then after mapping the source dataset to sufficient higher dimension spaces, the optimal separating hyper-plane must exist.

Here are two concepts that need to be clearly defined:

• Linearly separable: This means that a dataset can be divided into the target classes with a linear equation with the input of a training tuple.
• Nonlinearly separable: This means that none of the linear equations exist in the space with the same dimension as that of the training tuple.

The linear hyper-plane can be represented ...