An SVM model is a representation of the examples
as points in space, mapped so that the examples
of the separate categories are divided by a clear gap,
which is as wide as possible. New examples are then
mapped into that same space and predicted to belong
to a category based on which side of the gap they fall
on. More formally, a support vector machine constructs
a hyperplane or set of hyperplanes in a high- or infinitedimensional
space, which can be used for classification,
regression, or other tasks. Intuitively, a good separation
is achieved by the hyperplane with the largest distance
to the nearest training-data point of any class (so-called
functional margin), since in general the larger the margin
the lower the generalization error of the classifier.