A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a very powerful and versatile Machine Learning model, capable of performing linear or nonlinear classification, regression, and even outlier detection. It is one of the most popular models in Machine Learning, and anyone interested in Machine Learning should have it in their toolbox. SVMs are particularly well suited for classification of complex but small-sized or medium-sized datasets.
The case with two well-separated classes only can be understood in an intuitive way in terms of lines in a two-dimensional space separating the two classes (see figure below).
The basic mathematics behind the SVM is however less familiar to most of us. It relies on the definition of hyperplanes and the definition of a margin which separates classes (in case of classification problems) of variables. It is also used for regression problems.
With SVMs we distinguish between hard margin and soft margins. The latter introduces a so-called softening parameter to be discussed below. We distringuish also between linear and non-linear approaches. The latter are the most frequent ones since it is rather unlikely that we can separate classes easily by say straight lines.
When we implement a linear support vector machine, the main parameter is the constant \( C \). Small values of \( C \) mean simple models. These models are fast to train and also fast to predict and scale to very large data sets and work well with sparse data. Linear support vector machines make it easy to understand how a prediction is made, however it is often not easy to understand why coefficients are the way they are. These models work also well in higer dimensions.
The theory behind support vector machines (SVM hereafter) is based on the mathematical description of so-called hyperplanes. Let us start with a two-dimensional case. This will also allow us to introduce our first SVM examples. These will be tailored to the case of two specific classes, as displayed in the figure here.
We assume here that our data set can be well separated into two domains, where a straight line does the job in the separating the two classes. Here the two classes are represented by either crosses or circles.
The aim of the SVM algorithm is to find a hyperplane in an \( n \)-dimensional space, where \( n \) is the number of features that distinctly classifies the data points.
In an \( n \)-dimensional space, a hyperplane is what we call an affine subspace of dimension of \( n-1 \). As an example, in two dimension, a hyperplane is simply as straight line while in three dimensions it is a two-dimensional subspace, or stated simply, a plane.
In two dimensions, with the variables \( x_1 \) and \( x_2 \), the hyperplane is defined as
$$
\beta_0+\beta_1x_1+\beta_2x_2=0,
$$
In an \( n \)-dimensional space we have
$$
\beta_0+\beta_1x_1+\beta_2x_2+\dots +\beta_nx_n=0,
$$
With \( \hat{x}=\left[x_1,x_2,\dots, x_n\right] \), if the above condition is not met and
$$
\beta_0+\beta_1x_1+\beta_2x_2+\dots +\beta_nx_n < 0,
$$
we say that \( \hat{x} \) lies on one of the sides of the hyperplane and if
$$
\beta_0+\beta_1x_1+\beta_2x_2+\dots +\beta_nx_n>0,
$$
then \( \hat{x} \) lies on the other side.
Let us try to develop our intuition about SVMs by limiting ourselves to a two-dimensional plane. To separate the two classes of data points, there are many possible lines (hyperplanes if you prefer a more strict naming) that could be chosen. Our objective is to find a plane that has the maximum margin, i.e the maximum distance between data points of both classes. Maximizing the margin distance provides some reinforcement so that future data points can be classified with more confidence.
What a linear classifier attempts to accomplish is to split the feature space into two half spaces by placing a hyperplane between the data points. This hyperplane will be our decision boundary. All points on one side of the plane will belong to class one and all points on the other side of the plane will belong to the second class two.
Unfortunately there are many ways in which we can place a hyperplane to divide the data. Below is an example of two candidate hyperplanes for our data sample.
Let us define the function
$$
f(x) = \beta_0+\beta_1x = 0,
$$
as the function that determines the line \( L \) that separates two classes (our two features), see the figur here.
Define a vector \( \hat{\beta}:\left\{\beta_0,\beta_1\right\} \). Let us label the values of \( \hat{\beta} \) that satisfy this constraint as \( \overline{\beta} \).
Any two points \( x_1 \) and \( x_2 \) on the line \( L \) will satisfy \( \hat{\beta}(x_1-x_2)=0 \). We normalize the solution and define
$$
\overline{\beta} = \frac{\hat{\beta}}{\vert\vert \hat{\beta}\vert\vert},
$$
which is vector normal to the line \( L \).
The signed distance from a point \( x_0 \) on \( L \) to any point \( x \) is then
$$
\overline{\beta}(x-x_0) = \frac{\beta_1 x + \beta_0}{\vert\vert \hat{\beta}\vert\vert}.
$$
How do we find the parameters \( \beta_0 \) and \( \beta_0 \)? What we could do is to define a cost function which now contains the set of all misclassified points \( M \) and attempt to minimize this function
$$
C(\beta_0,\beta_1) = -\sum_{i\in M} y_i(\beta_1x_1+\beta_0).
$$
We could now for example define all values \( y_i =1 \) as misclassified in case we have \( \beta_1x_i+\beta_0 < 0 \) and the opposite if we have \( y_i=-1 \). Taking the derivatives gives us
$$
\frac{\partial C}{\partial \beta_0} = -\sum_{i\in M} y_i,
$$
and
$$
\frac{\partial C}{\partial \beta_1} = -\sum_{i\in M} y_ix_i.
$$
We can now use the Newton-Raphson method or gradient descent to solve the equations
$$
\beta_0 \leftarrow \beta_0 +\eta \frac{\partial C}{\partial \beta_0},
$$
and
$$
\beta_1 \leftarrow \beta_1 +\eta \frac{\partial C}{\partial \beta_1},
$$
where \( \eta \) is our by now well-known learning rate.
There are however problems with this approach, although it looks pretty straightforward to implement. In case we separate our data into two distinct classes, we may up with many possible lines, as indicated in the figure and shown by running the following program. For small gaps between the entries, we may also end up needing many iterations before the solutions converge and if the data cannot be separated properly into two distinct classes, we may not experience a converge at all.
from IPython.display import set_matplotlib_formats, display
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import mglearn
from cycler import cycler
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.svm import LinearSVC
from sklearn.datasets import make_blobs
X, y = make_blobs(centers=4, random_state=8)
y = y % 2
mglearn.discrete_scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], y)
plt.xlabel("Feature 0")
plt.ylabel("Feature 1")
plt.show()
from sklearn.svm import LinearSVC
linear_svm = LinearSVC().fit(X, y)
mglearn.plots.plot_2d_separator(linear_svm, X)
mglearn.discrete_scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], y)
plt.xlabel("Feature 0")
plt.ylabel("Feature 1")
# add the squared first feature
X_new = np.hstack([X, X[:, 1:] ** 2])
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D, axes3d
figure = plt.figure()
# visualize in 3D
ax = Axes3D(figure, elev=-152, azim=-26)
# plot first all the points with y==0, then all with y == 1
mask = y == 0
ax.scatter(X_new[mask, 0], X_new[mask, 1], X_new[mask, 2], c='b',
cmap=mglearn.cm2, s=60, edgecolor='k')
ax.scatter(X_new[~mask, 0], X_new[~mask, 1], X_new[~mask, 2], c='r', marker='^',
cmap=mglearn.cm2, s=60, edgecolor='k')
ax.set_xlabel("feature0")
ax.set_ylabel("feature1")
ax.set_zlabel("feature1 ** 2")
linear_svm_3d = LinearSVC().fit(X_new, y)
coef, intercept = linear_svm_3d.coef_.ravel(), linear_svm_3d.intercept_
# show linear decision boundary
figure = plt.figure()
ax = Axes3D(figure, elev=-152, azim=-26)
xx = np.linspace(X_new[:, 0].min() - 2, X_new[:, 0].max() + 2, 50)
yy = np.linspace(X_new[:, 1].min() - 2, X_new[:, 1].max() + 2, 50)
XX, YY = np.meshgrid(xx, yy)
ZZ = (coef[0] * XX + coef[1] * YY + intercept) / -coef[2]
ax.plot_surface(XX, YY, ZZ, rstride=8, cstride=8, alpha=0.3)
ax.scatter(X_new[mask, 0], X_new[mask, 1], X_new[mask, 2], c='b',
cmap=mglearn.cm2, s=60, edgecolor='k')
ax.scatter(X_new[~mask, 0], X_new[~mask, 1], X_new[~mask, 2], c='r', marker='^',
cmap=mglearn.cm2, s=60, edgecolor='k')
ax.set_xlabel("feature0")
ax.set_ylabel("feature1")
ax.set_zlabel("feature1 ** 2")
ZZ = YY ** 2
dec = linear_svm_3d.decision_function(np.c_[XX.ravel(), YY.ravel(), ZZ.ravel()])
plt.contourf(XX, YY, dec.reshape(XX.shape), levels=[dec.min(), 0, dec.max()],
cmap=mglearn.cm2, alpha=0.5)
mglearn.discrete_scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], y)
plt.xlabel("Feature 0")
plt.ylabel("Feature 1")
from sklearn.svm import SVC
X, y = mglearn.tools.make_handcrafted_dataset()
svm = SVC(kernel='rbf', C=10, gamma=0.1).fit(X, y)
mglearn.plots.plot_2d_separator(svm, X, eps=.5)
mglearn.discrete_scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], y)
# plot support vectors
sv = svm.support_vectors_
# class labels of support vectors are given by the sign of the dual coefficients
sv_labels = svm.dual_coef_.ravel() > 0
mglearn.discrete_scatter(sv[:, 0], sv[:, 1], sv_labels, s=15, markeredgewidth=3)
plt.xlabel("Feature 0")
plt.ylabel("Feature 1")
fig, axes = plt.subplots(3, 3, figsize=(15, 10))
for ax, C in zip(axes, [-1, 0, 3]):
for a, gamma in zip(ax, range(-1, 2)):
mglearn.plots.plot_svm(log_C=C, log_gamma=gamma, ax=a)
axes[0, 0].legend(["class 0", "class 1", "sv class 0", "sv class 1"],
ncol=4, loc=(.9, 1.2))