Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Lecture

Support Vector Machine Overview

In course

MICRO-455: Machine learning I

Description

This lecture provides an overview of Support Vector Machines (SVM), explaining how SVM maps input space to a higher dimension feature space using a kernel function. It compares SVM to other classifiers, highlighting advantages such as building a model with a global optimum guarantee, but also discussing disadvantages like computational cost and the need to choose hyperparameters. The lecture concludes by discussing when to use SVM and its limitations, such as being limited to two classes and lacking a notion of confidence.

Instructor

Aude Billard

Official source

Related concepts (28)

Multiclass classification

In machine learning and statistical classification, multiclass classification or multinomial classification is the problem of classifying instances into one of three or more classes (classifying instances into one of two classes is called binary classification). While many classification algorithms (notably multinomial logistic regression) naturally permit the use of more than two classes, some are by nature binary algorithms; these can, however, be turned into multinomial classifiers by a variety of strategies.

Statistical classification

In statistics, classification is the problem of identifying which of a set of categories (sub-populations) an observation (or observations) belongs to. Examples are assigning a given email to the "spam" or "non-spam" class, and assigning a diagnosis to a given patient based on observed characteristics of the patient (sex, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.). Often, the individual observations are analyzed into a set of quantifiable properties, known variously as explanatory variables or features.

Naive Bayes classifier

In statistics, naive Bayes classifiers are a family of simple "probabilistic classifiers" based on applying Bayes' theorem with strong (naive) independence assumptions between the features (see Bayes classifier). They are among the simplest Bayesian network models, but coupled with kernel density estimation, they can achieve high accuracy levels. Naive Bayes classifiers are highly scalable, requiring a number of parameters linear in the number of variables (features/predictors) in a learning problem.

Optimization problem

In mathematics, computer science and economics, an optimization problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions. Optimization problems can be divided into two categories, depending on whether the variables are continuous or discrete: An optimization problem with discrete variables is known as a discrete optimization, in which an object such as an integer, permutation or graph must be found from a countable set.

Binary classification

Binary classification is the task of classifying the elements of a set into two groups (each called class) on the basis of a classification rule. Typical binary classification problems include: Medical testing to determine if a patient has certain disease or not; Quality control in industry, deciding whether a specification has been met; In information retrieval, deciding whether a page should be in the result set of a search or not. Binary classification is dichotomization applied to a practical situation.

Related lectures (34)

Max-Margin Classifiers

Explores maximizing margins for better classification using support vector machines and the importance of choosing the right parameter.

Linear Models for Classification

Covers linear models for classification, including SVM, decision boundaries, support vectors, and Lagrange duality.

Support Vector Machines: SVMs

Explores Support Vector Machines, covering hard-margin, soft-margin, hinge loss, risks comparison, and the quadratic hinge loss.

Nearest Neighbor Rules: Part 2

Explores the Nearest Neighbor Rules, k-NN algorithm challenges, Bayes classifier, and k-means algorithm for clustering.