Linear Support Vector Machines Explained

With video explanation | Data Series | Episode 9.1

What are Support Vector Machines?

Support Vector machines are a common supervised machine learning algorithm used in both classification and regression problems, however are most commonly used for classification which will be the focus for this article.

Overview

The job of a support vector machine for classification problems is take labelled data such as the following:

and determine a hyperplane that separates the data:

We can then use this hyperplane to make predictions for which class a new data point belong to:

Since our new observation lies above the hyperplane we predict this observation belongs to Class A.