# Support Vector Machine¶

A Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a supervised learning model (machine learning) which can be used to classify image data. For Parallelization we use a Linear SVM from Apache Spark. Since we have more than two classes the One versus All (or One vs. Rest ) Strategy is used.

## Linear SVM¶

We are given a training dataset of $$n$$ points of the form

$(\vec{x}_1, y_1),\, \ldots ,\, (\vec{x}_n, y_n)$

where the $$y_i$$ are either 1 or −1, each indicating the class to which the point $$\vec{x}_i$$ belongs. Each $$\vec{x}_i$$ is a $$p$$-dimensional real vector. We want to find the "maximum-margin hyperplane" that divides the group of points $$\vec{x}_i$$ for which $$y_i=1$$ from the group of points for which $$y_i=-1$$, which is defined so that the distance between the hyperplane and the nearest point $$\vec{x}_i$$ from either group is maximized.

Any hyperplane can be written as the set of points $$\vec{x}$$ satisfying

$\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x} - b=0$

where $${\vec{w}}$$ is the (not necessarily normalized) normal vector to the hyperplane. This is much like Hesse normal form, except that $${\vec{w}}$$ is not necessarily a unit vector. The parameter $$\tfrac{b}{\|\vec{w}\|}$$ determines the offset of the hyperplane from the origin along the normal vector $${\vec{w}}$$.

Figure: Maximum-margin hyperplane and margins for an SVM trained with samples from two classes. Samples on the margin are called the support vectors.

### Hard-margin¶

If the training data are linearly separable, we can select two parallel hyperplanes that separate the two classes of data, so that the distance between them is as large as possible. The region bounded by these two hyperplanes is called the \"margin\", and the maximum-margin hyperplane is the hyperplane that lies halfway between them. These hyperplanes can be described by the equations $$\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x} - b=1$$

and

$\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x} - b=-1$

Geometrically, the distance between these two hyperplanes is $$\tfrac{2}{\|\vec{w}\|}$$, so to maximize the distance between the planes we want to minimize $$\|\vec{w}\|$$. As we also have to prevent data points from falling into the margin, we add the following constraint: for each $$i$$ either

$\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x}_i - b \ge 1, \text{if}\; y_i = 1$

or

$\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x}_i - b \le -1,\text{if}\; y_i = -1$

These constraints state that each data point must lie on the correct side of the margin.

This can be rewritten as:

$y_i(\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x}_i - b) \ge 1, \quad \text{ for all } 1 \le i \le n.\qquad\qquad(1)$

We can put this together to get the optimization problem:

$\text{Minimize } \|\vec{w}\| \text{ subject to } y_i(\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x}_i - b) \ge 1, \text{ for } i = 1, \ldots, n$

The $$\vec w$$ and $$b$$ that solve this problem determine our classifier, $$\vec{x} \mapsto sgn(\vec{w} \cdot \vec{x} - b)$$

An easy-to-see but important consequence of this geometric description is that the max-margin hyperplane is completely determined by those $$\vec{x}_i$$ which lie nearest to it. These $$\vec{x}_i$$ are called support vectors.

### Soft-margin¶

To extend SVM to cases in which the data are not linearly separable, we introduce the hinge loss function:

$\max\left(0, 1-y_i(\vec{w}\cdot\vec{x}_i + b)\right)$

This function is zero if the constraint in (1) is satisfied, in other words, if $$\vec{x}_i$$ lies on the correct side of the margin. For data on the wrong side of the margin, the function\'s value is proportional to the distance from the margin.

We then wish to minimize

$\left[ \frac 1 n \sum_{i=1}^n \max\left(0, 1 - y_i(\vec{w}\cdot \vec{x}_i + b)\right) \right] + \lambda\lVert \vec{w} \rVert^2,$

where the parameter $$\lambda$$ determines the tradeoff between increasing the margin-size and ensuring that the $$\vec{x}_i$$ lie on the correct side of the margin. Thus, for sufficiently small values of $$\lambda$$, the soft-margin SVM will behave identically to the hard-margin SVM if the input data are linearly classifiable, but will still learn if a classification rule is viable or not.

Todo