Support Vector Machines — Lecture series — Linear separability

In the previous post we wrapped up on our conversation about the dot product and in this post we are going to be talking about the concept of ‘linear separability’.

Learning objective:

Understand what linear separability is.

Main question:

How would you show a clear distinction between the points in the image in Fig 1 below?

Fig. 1

If the clustered points existed in one dimension, a point could have been constructed to separate them from each other. However if the clustered points existed in two dimension, a line could have been drawn to separate them. In three dimension, a plane could have been used to separate them.

Either ways, whenever a group of given points can be easily separated by a mathematical construct (point, line or plane), they are referred to as linearly separable.

In the next post, we would be talking about hyperplanes.