An easy to understand explanation of SVM’s — Not a myth

SVM’s are damn hard to understand. I experienced that firsthand. Normally in a way they seem a derivative of logistic regression but they are so much more than that.

I researched about SVM’s extensively these past days to somehow get a better understanding of the algorithm. And this post is a result of that research.

First of all I would like to direct the readers to this gem of a piece I found on reddit:

We have 2 colors of balls on the table that we want to separate.

We get a stick and put it on the table, this works pretty well right?

Some villain comes and places more balls on the table, it kind of works but one of the balls is on the wrong side and there is probably a better place to put the stick now.

SVMs try to put the stick in the best possible place by having as big a gap on either side of the stick as possible.