To whet your appetite for support vector machines, here’s a quote from machine learning researcher Andrew Ng:
“SVMs are among the best (and many believe are indeed the best) ‘off-the-shelf’ supervised learning algorithms.”
Professor Ng covers SVMs in his excellent Machine Learning MOOC, a gateway for many into the realm of data science, but leaves out some details, motivating us to put together some notes here to answer the question:
“What are the support vectors in support vector machines?”