# Visualizing SVM results

I would like to know if there are ways to visualize the separating hyperplane in an SVM with more than 3 features/dimensions. Normally, classification plots are possible with 1,2 and 3 dimensions (see for e.g., Noble, Nature Biotechnology 2006. Fig 1 [1]). Certainly, I understand that with 4 or more dimensions visualization is hard if not impossible. However, for presentation purposes it would be nice if a separating hyperplane could be visualized in some way. Other visualizations that show the quality of the result other than plotting a ROC curve are also welcome!

As example I took the Iris data from r, below reduced to two dimensions. The resulting fit can be plotted and are shown in the figure (code partly copied from [2]). However, how to do this if the four features, Sepal.Length, Sepal.Width, Petal.Length and Petal.Width were kept?

library(e1071)
iris.part = subset(iris, Species != 'setosa')
iris.part$Species = factor(iris.part$Species)
iris.part = iris.part[, c(1,2,5)]
fit = svm(Species ~ ., data=iris.part, type='C-classification', kernel='linear')
plot(fit, iris.part)


Usually a dimension reduction technique is employed to visualize fit on many variables.

Usually again SVD is used to reduce dimensions and keep 2 components, and visualize.

Here's how it might look like -

Note that the x and y axes are the top 2 components of the SVD decomposition.

I haven't used R much lately, so I used python for creating the picture above.

from sklearn.decomposition import TruncatedSVD
from sklearn.svm import SVC

# To visualize the actual data in top 2 dimensions
x,y=iris.data,iris.target

model=SVC().fit(x,y)
predicted=model.predict(x)

svd=TruncatedSVD().fit_transform(x)

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(16,6))
plt.subplot(1,2,0)
plt.title('Actual data, with errors highlighted')
colors=['r','g','b']
for t in [0,1,2]:
plt.plot(svd[y==t][:,0],svd[y==t][:,1],colors[t]+'+')

errX,errY=svd[predicted!=y],y[predicted!=y]
for t in [0,1,2]:
plt.plot(errX[errY==t][:,0],errX[errY==t][:,1],colors[t]+'o')

# To visualize the SVM classifier across
import numpy as np
density=15
domain=[np.linspace(min(x[:,i]),max(x[:,i]),num=density*4 if i==2 else density) for i in range(4)]

from itertools import product
allxs=list(product(*domain))
allys=model.predict(allxs)

allxs_svd=TruncatedSVD().fit_transform(allxs)

plt.subplot(1,2,1)
plt.title('Prediction space reduced to top two SVD\'s')
plt.ylim(-3,3)
for t in [0,1,2]:
plt.scatter(allxs_svd[allys==t][:,0],allxs_svd[allys==t][:,1],color=colors[t],alpha=0.2/density,edgecolor='None')

• Thank you very much for this thorough answer! I read about using PCA to do this. I wonder if the obtained hyperplane with the resulting two components reliably represents the one of the original dimensions, or if it is simply a new data problem that one creates by reducing dimensions. Any ideas on this? – Ruthger Righart Jun 2 '15 at 15:06
• As long as the model learned in the full representation of the data, the reduced 2-dimensional view is simply a view - visualizing what happened. In other cases though, often where you have high dimensional feature-space, you do apply your models on the reduced space - there you do change the problem to a 'new' one. This is frequently done in text mining to reduce the term-document-matrix before any model is fitted. – KalEl Jun 2 '15 at 15:12