SVM Tutorial Part1
SVM Tutorial Part1
Figure 1
We have plotted the size and weight of several people, and there is also a way to distinguish between men
and women.
With such data, using a SVM will allow us to answer the following question:
Given a particular data point (weight and size), is the person a man or a woman ?
For instance: if someone measures 175 cm and weights 80 kg, is it a man of a woman?
This one looks better. When we use it with real life data, we can see it still make perfect classification.
The black hyperplane classifies more accurately than the green one
That's why the objective of a SVM is to find the optimal separating hyperplane:
and because it is the one which will generalize better with unseen data
The further an hyperplane is from a data point, the larger its margin will be.
This means that the optimal hyperplane will be the one with the biggest margin.
That is why the objective of the SVM is to find the optimal separating hyperplane which maximizes
the margin of the training data.
This concludes this introductory post about the math behind SVM. There was not a lot of formula, but in
the next article we will put on some numbers and try to get the mathematical view of this using geometry
and vectors.