Which of the parameters in LibSVM is the slack variable?

Question

I am a bit confused about the namings in the SVM. I am using this library LibSVM. There are so many parameters that can be set. Does anyone know which of these is the slack variable? thx

Answer 1

The "slack variable" is C in c-svm and nu in nu-SVM. These both serve the same function in their respective formulations - controlling the tradeoff between a wide margin and classifier error. In the case of C, one generally test it in orders of magnitude, say 10^-4, 10^-3, 10^-2,... to 1, 5 or so. nu is a number between 0 and 1, generally from .1 to .8, which controls the ratio of support vectors to data points. When nu is .1, the margin is small, the number of support vectors will be a small percentage of the number of data points. When nu is .8, the margin is very large and most of the points will fall in the margin.

The other things to consider are your choice of kernel (linear, RBF, sigmoid, polynomial) and the parameters for the chosen kernel. Generally one has to do a lot of experimenting to find the best combination of parameters. However, be careful of over-fitting to your dataset.

Burges wrote a great tutorial: A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition

But if you mostly just want to know how to USE it and less about how it works, read "A Practical Guide to Support Vector Classication" by Chih-Wei Hsu, Chih-Chung Chang, and Chih-Jen Lin (authors of libsvm)