Hyperplanes and all that

The theory behind support vector machines (SVM hereafter) is based on the mathematical description of so-called hyperplanes. Let us start with a two-dimensional case. This will also allow us to introduce our first SVM examples. These will be tailored to the case of two specific classes, as displayed in the figure here based on the usage of the petal data.

We assume here that our data set can be well separated into two domains, where a straight line does the job in the separating the two classes. Here the two classes are represented by either squares or circles.

from sklearn import datasets
from sklearn.svm import SVC, LinearSVC
from sklearn.linear_model import SGDClassifier
from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.rcParams['axes.labelsize'] = 14
plt.rcParams['xtick.labelsize'] = 12
plt.rcParams['ytick.labelsize'] = 12


iris = datasets.load_iris()
X = iris["data"][:, (2, 3)]  # petal length, petal width
y = iris["target"]

setosa_or_versicolor = (y == 0) | (y == 1)
X = X[setosa_or_versicolor]
y = y[setosa_or_versicolor]



C = 5
alpha = 1 / (C * len(X))

lin_clf = LinearSVC(loss="hinge", C=C, random_state=42)
svm_clf = SVC(kernel="linear", C=C)
sgd_clf = SGDClassifier(loss="hinge", learning_rate="constant", eta0=0.001, alpha=alpha,
                        max_iter=100000, random_state=42)

scaler = StandardScaler()
X_scaled = scaler.fit_transform(X)

lin_clf.fit(X_scaled, y)
svm_clf.fit(X_scaled, y)
sgd_clf.fit(X_scaled, y)

print("LinearSVC:                   ", lin_clf.intercept_, lin_clf.coef_)
print("SVC:                         ", svm_clf.intercept_, svm_clf.coef_)
print("SGDClassifier(alpha={:.5f}):".format(sgd_clf.alpha), sgd_clf.intercept_, sgd_clf.coef_)

# Compute the slope and bias of each decision boundary
w1 = -lin_clf.coef_[0, 0]/lin_clf.coef_[0, 1]
b1 = -lin_clf.intercept_[0]/lin_clf.coef_[0, 1]
w2 = -svm_clf.coef_[0, 0]/svm_clf.coef_[0, 1]
b2 = -svm_clf.intercept_[0]/svm_clf.coef_[0, 1]
w3 = -sgd_clf.coef_[0, 0]/sgd_clf.coef_[0, 1]
b3 = -sgd_clf.intercept_[0]/sgd_clf.coef_[0, 1]

# Transform the decision boundary lines back to the original scale
line1 = scaler.inverse_transform([[-10, -10 * w1 + b1], [10, 10 * w1 + b1]])
line2 = scaler.inverse_transform([[-10, -10 * w2 + b2], [10, 10 * w2 + b2]])
line3 = scaler.inverse_transform([[-10, -10 * w3 + b3], [10, 10 * w3 + b3]])

# Plot all three decision boundaries
plt.figure(figsize=(11, 4))
plt.plot(line1[:, 0], line1[:, 1], "k:", label="LinearSVC")
plt.plot(line2[:, 0], line2[:, 1], "b--", linewidth=2, label="SVC")
plt.plot(line3[:, 0], line3[:, 1], "r-", label="SGDClassifier")
plt.plot(X[:, 0][y==1], X[:, 1][y==1], "bs") # label="Iris-Versicolor"
plt.plot(X[:, 0][y==0], X[:, 1][y==0], "yo") # label="Iris-Setosa"
plt.xlabel("Petal length", fontsize=14)
plt.ylabel("Petal width", fontsize=14)
plt.legend(loc="upper center", fontsize=14)
plt.axis([0, 5.5, 0, 2])

plt.show()