Core ML Concepts · intermediate · concept 31 of 311 · Updated Nov 4, 2026
Support Vector Machines (SVM)
A classifier that finds the boundary with the widest possible margin between classes, and uses the kernel trick to draw curved boundaries by implicitly working in a higher-dimensional space. Pre-deep-learning state of the art, and still strong on small, clean datasets.
Top AI contributors on this
- Michael I. JordanInria Paris / UC Berkeley (emeritus)
- John HopfieldPrinceton University (emeritus)
- Cassie KozyrkovIndependent (formerly Google)
- Chelsea FinnStanford University / Physical Intelligence
- Daphne Kollerinsitro
- Sébastien BubeckOpenAI
Key terms
MarginSupport vectorsKernel trickHyperplaneSoft margin
Learn these first
Where you meet it in the real world
Text classification with few examples, bioinformatics, image classification before CNNs took over
Videos
▶ Support Vector Machines Part 1 (of 3): Main Ideas!!! ↗
StatQuest with Josh Starmer · YouTube
▶ 16. Learning: Support Vector Machines ↗
MIT OpenCourseWare · YouTube
Guides and articles
CS229: Machine Learning ↗
Stanford
StatQuest video index ↗
StatQuest with Josh Starmer
Courses, papers, and more