Calculate probability for LibLinear classification results I am using LibLinear for a document classification task, in which I would like to calculate the probability of correctness for each prediction. In fact, in the LibLinear, it does provide probability output for logistic regression, but not for default support vector classification task. Furthermore, based on 10-fold cross validation, the logistic regression is nearly 10% worse than support vector classification. 
So can anyone tell me, if I continue to use the support vector classification for the solution, is there a method to calculate the probability separately from the program?
 A: You can use a sigmoid function $f(d) = \frac{1}{1 + e^{-\alpha(d-\beta)}}$
to convert your SVM decision value $d = (w, x) + b$ into a number between 0 and 1 which can be treated as probability. You can adjust parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$ depending on your data.
For more elaborate approaches, see these papers:


*

*B.Zadrozny, C. Elkan, Transforming classifier scores into accurate multiclass probability estimates.

*J.Drish, Obtaining calibrated probability estimates from Support Vector Machines.

A: At least in R, only two algorithms provide the probabilities in LiblineaR interface.
Here is the FAQ of the actual library:
Q: How do I choose the solver? Should I use logistic regression or linear SVM? How about L1/L2 regularization?
Generally we recommend linear SVM as its training is faster and the accuracy is competitive. However, if you would like to have probability outputs, you may consider logistic regression.

Moreover, try L2 regularization first unless you need a sparse model. For most cases, L1 regularization does not give higher accuracy but may be slightly slower in training.

Among L2-regularized SVM solvers, try the default one (L2-loss SVC dual) first. If it is too slow, use the option -s 2 to solve the primal problem.

It seems the svm algorithms don't provide probabilities as output.
