Support Vector Machines
Maximum Margin
Finding the widest street
SVM finds the hyperplane that maximizes the margin between classes. Current margin: 0.49 — try different angles to find the widest street.
Step 1 of 6: Maximum Margin
Finding the widest street
SVM finds the hyperplane that maximizes the margin between classes. Current margin: 0.49 — try different angles to find the widest street.
Step 2 of 6: Support Vectors
The critical few
Only points on the margin boundary determine the decision surface — these are support vectors. The dragged point is far from the margin — moving it has no effect on the boundary.
Step 3 of 6: Soft Margin
Tolerating some errors
Moderate C (1.0): Balanced trade-off between margin width and classification errors.
Step 4 of 6: The Kernel Trick
Mapping to higher dimensions
Polynomial kernel: implicitly maps data to higher dimensions where curved boundaries can separate non-linear patterns.
Step 5 of 6: RBF Gamma
Controlling boundary flexibility
Moderate γ (0.40): Balanced boundary flexibility. Good generalization between training and test data.
Step 6 of 6: Multi-class SVM
One-vs-Rest strategy
For 3 classes, SVM trains 3 one-vs-rest classifiers and picks the highest confidence. Each of the 3 classifiers learns to separate one class from all others.