Pointers to some good SVM Tutorial

algorithm machine-learning svm libsvm
Alphaneo picture Alphaneo · Jul 2, 2009 · Viewed 20.2k times · Source

I have been trying to grasp the basics of Support Vector Machines, and downloaded and read many online articles. But still am not able to grasp it.

I would like to know, if there are some

  • nice tutorial
  • sample code which can be used for understanding

or something, that you can think of, and that will enable me to learn SVM Basics easily.

PS: I somehow managed to learn PCA (Principal Component Analysis). BTW, you guys would have guessed that I am working on Machine Learning.

Answer

Stompchicken picture Stompchicken · Jul 2, 2009

The standard recommendation for a tutorial in SVMs is A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition by Christopher Burges. Another good place to learn about SVMs is the Machine Learning Course at Stanford (SVMs are covered in lectures 6-8). Both these are quite theoretical and heavy on the maths.

As for source code; SVMLight, libsvm and TinySVM are all open-source, but the code is not very easy to follow. I haven't looked at each of them very closely, but the source for TinySVM is probably the is easiest to understand. There is also a pseudo-code implementation of the SMO algorithm in this paper.

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