What is SVM?

In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks[1]) are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Vladimir Vapnik with colleagues (Boser et al., 1992, Guyon et al., 1993, Cortes and Vapnik, 1995,[1] Vapnik et al., 1997[citation needed]) SVMs are one of the most robust prediction methods, being based on statistical learning frameworks or VC theory proposed by Vapnik (1982, 1995) and Chervonenkis (1974). Given a set of training examples, each marked as belonging to one of two categories, an SVM training algorithm builds a model that assigns new examples to one category or the other, making it a non-probabilistic binary linear classifier (although methods such as Platt scaling exist to use SVM in a probabilistic classification setting). SVM maps training examples to points in space so as to maximise the width of the gap between the two categories. New examples are then mapped into that same space and predicted to belong to a category based on which side of the gap they fall.

In addition to performing linear classification, SVMs can efficiently perform a non-linear classification using what is called the kernel trick, implicitly mapping their inputs into high-dimensional feature spaces.

The support vector clustering[2] algorithm, created by Hava Siegelmann and Vladimir Vapnik, applies the statistics of support vectors, developed in the support vector machines algorithm, to categorize unlabeled data.[citation needed] These data sets require unsupervised learning approaches, which attempt to find natural clustering of the data to groups and, then, to map new data according to these clusters.

SVM stands for ""support vector machine". It is a machine learning model for supervised learning tasks. It was popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, before deep learning take off. The classic use case is binary classification, but its extension can also do multi-label classification as we as regression. Kernel methods greatly enhanced SVM's capability to perform non-linear machine learning tasks.