What is SVM in Supervised Machine Learning?

Data Science, AI and ML
#1

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a relatively simple Supervised Machine Learning Algorithm used for classification and/or regression. It is more preferred for classification but is sometimes very useful for regression as well. Basically, SVM finds a hyper-plane that creates a boundary between the types of data.

In 2-dimensional space, this hyper-plane is nothing but a line. In SVM, we plot each data item in the dataset in an N-dimensional space, where N is the number of features/attributes in the data. Next, find the optimal hyperplane to separate the data. So by this, you must have understood that inherently, SVM can only perform binary classification (i.e., choose between two classes). However, there are various techniques to use for multi-class problems.

Support Vector Machine for Multi-Class Problems To perform SVM on multi-class problems, we can create a binary classifier for each class of the data. The two results of each classifier will be :

  • The data point belongs to that class OR
  • The data point does not belong to that class.