Kernels and support vector machines

So far, we've introduced the notion of maximum margin classification under linearly separable conditions and its extension to the support vector classifier, which still uses a hyperplane as the separating boundary but handles data sets that are not linearly separable by specifying a budget for tolerating errors. The observations that are on or within the margin, or are misclassified by the support vector classifier are support vectors. The critical role that these play in the positioning of the decision boundary was also seen in an alternative model representation of the support vector classifier that uses inner products.

What is common in the situations that we have seen so far in this chapter is that our model is always linear in terms of the input features. We've seen that the ability to create models that implement nonlinear boundaries between the classes to be separated is far more flexible in terms of the different kinds of underlying target functions...