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.