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9. Advanced Classification: Kernel Methods and SVMs > Using LIBSVM
Using LIBSVM
The explanation in the previous section should help you understand how and why support-vector machines work, but the algorithm for training a support-vector machine involves mathematical concepts that are very computationally intensive and are beyond the scope of this chapter. For these reasons, this section will introduce an open-source library called LIBSVM, which can train an SVM model, make predictions, and test the predictions within a dataset. It even has built-in support for the radial-basis function and other kernel methods.
You can download LIBSVM from http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/˜cjlin/libsvm.
LIBSVM is written in C++ and includes a version written in Java. The download package includes a Python wrapper called svm.py. In order to use svm.py, you need compiled versions of LIBSVM for your platform. If you’re using Windows, a DLL called svmc.dll is included. (Python 2.5 requires that you rename this file to svmc.pyd because it can’t import libraries with DLL extensions.) The documentation for LIBSVM explains how to compile the library for other platforms.
