Chapter 6. Support Vector Machines

In this chapter, we are going to take a fresh look at nonlinear predictive models by introducing support vector machines. Support vector machines, often abbreviated as SVMs, are very commonly used for classification problems, although there are certainly ways to perform function approximation and regression tasks with them. In this chapter, we will focus on the more typical case of their role in classification. To do this, we'll first present the notion of maximal margin classification, which presents an alternative formulation of how to choose between many possible classification boundaries and differs from approaches we have seen thus far, such as maximum likelihood. We'll introduce the related idea of support vectors and how, together with maximal margin classification, we can obtain a linear model in the form of a support vector classifier. Finally, we'll present how we can generalize these ideas in order to introduce nonlinearity...