This document provides an overview of support vector machines and related pattern recognition techniques:
- SVMs find the optimal separating hyperplane between classes by maximizing the margin between classes using support vectors.
- Nonlinear decision surfaces can be achieved by transforming data into a higher-dimensional feature space using kernel functions.
- Soft margin classifiers allow some misclassified points by introducing slack variables to improve generalization.
- Relevance vector machines take a Bayesian approach, placing a sparsity-inducing prior over weights to provide a probabilistic interpretation.