In-Depth: Support Vector Machines

< In Depth: Linear Regression | Contents | In-Depth: Decision Trees and Random Forests >

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a particularly powerful and flexible class of supervised algorithms for both classification and regression. In this section, we will develop the intuition behind support vector machines and their use in classification problems.

We begin with the standard imports:

In [1]:

%matplotlib inline
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy import stats

# use seaborn plotting defaults
import seaborn as sns; sns.set()

Motivating Support Vector Machines¶

As part of our disussion of Bayesian classification (see In Depth: Naive Bayes Classification), we learned a simple model describing the distribution of each underlying class, and used these generative models to probabilistically determine labels for new points. That was an example of generative classification; here we will consider instead discriminative classification: rather than modeling each class, we simply find a line or curve (in two dimensions) or manifold (in multiple dimensions) that divides the classes from each other.

As an example of this, consider the simple case of a classification task, in which the two classes of points are well separated:

In [2]:

from sklearn.datasets.samples_generator import make_blobs
X, y = make_blobs(n_samples=50, centers=2,
                  random_state=0, cluster_std=0.60)
plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], c=y, s=50, cmap='autumn');

A linear discriminative classifier would attempt to draw a straight line separating the two sets of data, and thereby create a model for classification. For two dimensional data like that shown here, this is a task we could do by hand. But immediately we see a problem: there is more than one possible dividing line that can perfectly discriminate between the two classes!

We can draw them as follows:

In [3]:

xfit = np.linspace(-1, 3.5)
plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], c=y, s=50, cmap='autumn')
plt.plot([0.6], [2.1], 'x', color='red', markeredgewidth=2, markersize=10)

for m, b in [(1, 0.65), (0.5, 1.6), (-0.2, 2.9)]:
    plt.plot(xfit, m * xfit + b, '-k')

plt.xlim(-1, 3.5);