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# Support vector machines and Radon's theorem

• *Corresponding author: Brittany Story

• The foundational work for this paper was completed while Elin Farnell was a research scientist in the Department of Mathematics at Colorado State University.
° The foundational work for this paper was completed while Brittany Story was a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics at Colorado State University.

• A support vector machine (SVM) is an algorithm that finds a hyperplane which optimally separates labeled data points in $\mathbb{R}^n$ into positive and negative classes. The data points on the margin of this separating hyperplane are called support vectors. We connect the possible configurations of support vectors to Radon's theorem, which provides guarantees for when a set of points can be divided into two classes (positive and negative) whose convex hulls intersect. If the convex hulls of the positive and negative support vectors are projected onto a separating hyperplane, then the projections intersect if and only if the hyperplane is optimal. Further, with a particular type of general position, we show that (a) the projected convex hulls of the support vectors intersect in exactly one point, (b) the support vectors are stable under perturbation, (c) there are at most $n+1$ support vectors, and (d) every number of support vectors from 2 up to $n+1$ is possible. Finally, we perform computer simulations studying the expected number of support vectors, and their configurations, for randomly generated data. We observe that as the distance between classes of points increases for this type of randomly generated data, configurations with fewer support vectors become more likely.

Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 52C35, 62-07; Secondary: 62R40.

 Citation:

• Figure 1.  Linearly separable two-class data, along with a linear classifier (a separating hyperplane) with the maximal margin of separation

Figure 2.  Decision boundary hyperplane $\mathcal{P}$ along with a vector $\mathbf{x}_i$ and its decomposition with respect to $\mathcal{P}$, where $\mathbf{w}$ and $\mathbf{x}_i$ are drawn with tails at the same base point in the hyperplane for context

Figure 3.  Examples of two sets in $\mathbb{R}^2$ of size 4 that cannot be shattered by affine separators. Consider the labeled classes drawn as red squares and blue circles. In each example, the convex hulls of the two classes intersect at the origin. This implies that no affine separator can correctly classify according to these labels

Figure 4.  Two Radon configurations in $\mathbb{R}^2$

Figure 5.  Four possible support vector configurations in $\mathbb{R}^3$ (the figures with planes), each drawn above its corresponding projected Radon configuration in the separating hyperplane (the figures with just lines and points). As we will see in Section 5, when points are in strong general position, there can be at most $n+1$ support vectors. Thus in $\mathbb{R}^3$, we can have configurations with 2, 3, or 4 support vectors. See Table 2 in Section 6 for relative frequencies of these configurations

Figure 6.  The same dataset with two different separating hyperplanes. Note that (A) does not contain a Radon point in the projection of the convex hulls whereas (B) does. The margin of separation is larger in (B) than in (A)

Figure 7.  Two examples of point sets $X\subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ that are not in strong general position. (The point sets are unlabeled, and the colors are for illustration.) On the left, in $\mathbb{R}^2$, the vector $\overrightarrow{\mathbf{p}_0\mathbf{p}_1}$ is parallel to $\overrightarrow{\mathbf{n}_0\mathbf{n}_1}$, violating condition $(ii)$ of strong general position. On the right, we provide an example in $\mathbb{R}^3$. If $\mathbf{w}$ is the shortest vector between $\mathbf{p}_0$ and the line between $\mathbf{n}_0$ and $\mathbf{n}_1$, then the hyperplane perpendicular to $\mathbf{w}$ that contains $\mathbf{n}_0, \mathbf{n}_1$ also contains $\mathbf{n}_2$, violating condition $(iii)$. In other words, the orthogonal projection of $\mathbf{p}_0$ onto the affine span of $\mathbf{n}_0, \mathbf{n}_1, \mathbf{n}_2$ lies on the line segment between $\mathbf{n}_0$ and $\mathbf{n}_1$, which differs from the top left in Figure 5 where instead the projection of $\mathbf{p}_0$ is in the interior of the convex hull of $\mathbf{n}_0$, $\mathbf{n}_1$, and $\mathbf{n}_2$

Figure 8.  Example images of randomly generated linearly seperable groups of points with (A) two and (B) three support vectors, both drawn from trials where $a = 10$

Figure 9.  A 2-simplex embedded in the 2-dimensional subspace $x_1+x_2+x_3 = 1$ of $\mathbb{R}^3$ with support vectors assigned to the vertices

Table 1.  The number of support vectors in $\mathbb{R}^2$ from 1, 000 trials, as a function of a parameter $a$ controlling the expected distance between the center of the distributions

 $a =$ 5 10 20 # configurations with 2 support vectors 417 632 809 # configurations with 3 support vectors 583 368 191

Table 2.  The number of support vectors in $\mathbb{R}^3$ from 1, 000 trials, as a function of a parameter $a$ controlling the expected distance between the center of the distributions

 $a =$ 5 10 20 # configurations with 2 support vectors 279 554 758 # configurations with 3 support vectors 458 367 221 # configurations with 4 support vectors (2–2 split) 145 47 9 # configurations with 4 support vectors (3–1 split) 118 32 12
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