What is a Support Vector Machine, and Why Would I Use it?

This post originally appeared on the Yhat blog. Yhat is a Brooklyn based company whose goal is to make data science applicable for developers, data scientists, and businesses alike. Yhat provides a software platform for deploying and managing predictive algorithms as REST APIs, while eliminating the painful engineering obstacles associated with production environments like testing, versioning, scaling and security. SVM is a supervised machine learning algorithm which can be used for classification or regression problems. It uses a technique called the kernel trick to transform your data and then based on these transformations it finds an optimal boundary between the possible outputs.