Documentation for libsvm in python

Question

Is there any good documentation for libsvm in python with a few non-trivial examples, that explain what each of the flags mean, and how data can the trained and tested from end to end?

(There is no official documentation for libsvm. The 'official documentation' provided for libsvm is just a paper on how SVM's works and does not contain any usage instructions for the module. Hence, please link any useful python documentation / example code for libsvm here)

Answer 1

If you have already downloaded libSVM you will find some "usefull" documentation inside two files:

• ./libsvm-3.xx/README file in the top directory which covers the C/C++ API and also documentation about the binary executables svm-predict, svm-scale and svm-train

• ./libsvm-3.xx/python/README which deals with the Python interfaces (svm and svmutil), which I think is what you are looking for. However the example is quite naive although is a good beginning.

Let me suggest you that if you want to work with libSVM in Python, the scikit-learn package implements SVM using libSVM underneath, it much more easy, better documented and let's you control the same parameters of libSVM.