Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Someone 2603 days ago
Learning about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support-vector_machine.

That will tell you SVMs are ancient (linear version dates back to 1963), and that what they do here isn’t really machine learning, but something similar to linear regression: just as linear regression finds the best (in some strict mathematical sense) line describing a set of points, this finds the best (in a similar mathematical sense) line splitting two sets of points.

For software, take a look at https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/. Easy to use, fairly flexible, with a Java applet you can play with.