Plot different SVM classifiers in the iris dataset

Comparison of different linear SVM classifiers on a 2D projection of the iris dataset. We only consider the first 2 features of this dataset:

• Sepal length
• Sepal width

This example shows how to plot the decision surface for four SVM classifiers with different kernels.

The linear models LinearSVC() and SVC(kernel='linear') yield slightly different decision boundaries. This can be a consequence of the following differences:

• LinearSVC minimizes the squared hinge loss while SVC minimizes the regular hinge loss.
• LinearSVC uses the One-vs-All (also known as One-vs-Rest) multiclass reduction while SVC uses the One-vs-One multiclass reduction.

Both linear models have linear decision boundaries (intersecting hyperplanes) while the non-linear kernel models (polynomial or Gaussian RBF) have more flexible non-linear decision boundaries with shapes that depend on the kind of kernel and its parameters.

print(__doc__)

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from sklearn import svm, datasets

# import some data to play with
iris = datasets.load_iris()
X = iris.data[:, :2]  # we only take the first two features. We could
                      # avoid this ugly slicing by using a two-dim dataset
y = iris.target

h = .02  # step size in the mesh

# we create an instance of SVM and fit out data. We do not scale our
# data since we want to plot the support vectors
C = 1.0  # SVM regularization parameter
svc = svm.SVC(kernel='linear', C=C).fit(X, y)
rbf_svc = svm.SVC(kernel='rbf', gamma=0.7, C=C).fit(X, y)
poly_svc = svm.SVC(kernel='poly', degree=3, C=C).fit(X, y)
lin_svc = svm.LinearSVC(C=C).fit(X, y)

# create a mesh to plot in
x_min, x_max = X[:, 0].min() - 1, X[:, 0].max() + 1
y_min, y_max = X[:, 1].min() - 1, X[:, 1].max() + 1
xx, yy = np.meshgrid(np.arange(x_min, x_max, h),
                     np.arange(y_min, y_max, h))

# title for the plots
titles = ['SVC with linear kernel',
          'LinearSVC (linear kernel)',
          'SVC with RBF kernel',
          'SVC with polynomial (degree 3) kernel']


for i, clf in enumerate((svc, lin_svc, rbf_svc, poly_svc)):
    # Plot the decision boundary. For that, we will assign a color to each
    # point in the mesh [x_min, x_max]x[y_min, y_max].
    plt.subplot(2, 2, i + 1)
    plt.subplots_adjust(wspace=0.4, hspace=0.4)

    Z = clf.predict(np.c_[xx.ravel(), yy.ravel()])

    # Put the result into a color plot
    Z = Z.reshape(xx.shape)
    plt.contourf(xx, yy, Z, cmap=plt.cm.coolwarm, alpha=0.8)

    # Plot also the training points
    plt.scatter(X[:, 0], X[:, 1], c=y, cmap=plt.cm.coolwarm)
    plt.xlabel('Sepal length')
    plt.ylabel('Sepal width')
    plt.xlim(xx.min(), xx.max())
    plt.ylim(yy.min(), yy.max())
    plt.xticks(())
    plt.yticks(())
    plt.title(titles[i])

plt.show()

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 0.690 seconds)