RTUComputer ScienceYr 2023 · Sem 62023

Q14Machine Learning

Question

4 marks

How does a Support Vector Machine (SVM) handle non-linearly separable data?

Answer

SVM uses the kernel trick to map data to a higher-dimensional space where a linear hyperplane can separate the classes.

Standard linear SVMs fail when data points overlap non-linearly. By applying kernel functions (like Radial Basis Function (RBF), Polynomial, or Sigmoid), SVM computes the dot product of data points in a transformed high-dimensional space. This allows it to construct a non-linear decision boundary in the original feature space without explicitly calculating the transformation.

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