Support Vector Machine: The Street/ Corridor

Imagine you have two groups of data points on a map, say, blue dots and green dots. Your goal is to draw a straight line that separates them.

You could draw many possible lines, right?

So, which line is the best one?

The SVM answers: The best line is the one that is as far away from the closest dots in both groups as possible.

Think of it as trying to draw the widest possible street between the two groups of houses (the dots). The line in the middle of this street is your decision boundary.

This “widest street” idea gives us the maximum margin or buffer, making our classification more robust. We’re more confident that new points near the boundary will be classified correctly.