SVM

More formally, a support vector machine constructs a hyperplane or set of hyperplanes in a high- or infinite-dimensional space, which can be used for classification, regression, or other tasks. Intuitively, a good separation is achieved by the hyperplane that has the largest distance to the nearest training data point of any class (so-called functional margin), since in general the larger the margin the lower the generalization error of the classifier.

Whereas the original problem may be stated in a finite dimensional space, it often happens that the sets to discriminate are not linearly separable in that space. For this reason, it was proposed that the original finite-dimensional space be mapped into a much higher-dimensional space, presumably making the separation easier in that space. To keep the computational load reasonable, the mappings used by SVM schemes are designed to ensure that dot products may be computed easily in terms of the variables in the original space, by defining them in terms of a kernel function selected to suit the problem.^[2] The hyperplanes in the higher-dimensional space are defined as the set of points whose dot product with a vector in that space is constant. The vectors defining the hyperplanes can be chosen to be linear combinations with parameters of images of feature vectors that occur in the data base. With this choice of a hyperplane, the points in the feature space that are mapped into the hyperplane are defined by the relation: Note that if becomes small as grows further away from , each term in the sum measures the degree of closeness of the test point to the corresponding data base point . In this way, the sum of kernels above can be used to measure the relative nearness of each test point to the data points originating in one or the other of the sets to be discriminated. Note the fact that the set of points mapped into any hyperplane can be quite convoluted as a result, allowing much more complex discrimination between sets which are not convex at all in the original space.

Linear separability

The problem of determining if a pair of sets is linearly separable and finding a separating hyperplane if they are arises in several areas. In statistics and machine learning, classifying certain types of data is a problem for which good algorithms exist that are based on this concept.

Three non-collinear points in two classes ('+' and '-') are always linearly separable in two dimensions. This is illustrated by the three examples in the following figure (the all '+' case is not shown, but is similar to the all '-' case):
However, not all sets of four points, no three collinear, are linearly separable in two dimensions. The following example would need two straight lines and thus is not linearly separable: